Urbanized - Environment Art

I developed a custom Houdini tool to generate foliage in engine based on any placed geometry/s allowing in engine bushes of any shape or size to be made without external tools. Leaves textures are taken from Megascans and leaf meshes are input into the tool allowing up to 6 unique leaves to be placed with different rules each.

Tool produces instances of leaves and traditional geo for accompanying foliage structure. Ground level is set via a slider in the Houdini Engine tool.

Assets were blocked out in Unreal Engine using BSP's before being exported to Maya. Once in Maya I modeled for mid-poly with the intent of using Nanite due to Lumen and VSM's issues when tracing against non Nanite geometry.

Materials are custom but source textures from Megascans. Water and pond scum materials us a custom vertex animation system for emulating angle corrected water flow.

Lighting does most of the heavy lifting in this project relying heavily on bounced light and small light sources. A faked light source was added to provide the illumination on the main pipe and I took some artistic liberties with how light casts from the lights out front of the dwellings.

Reference Image vs Final Render

I took a lot of liberties with lighting and adjusted some of the design to be more piratical for a theoretical game space such but mostly kept towards the concept art.

Nick Stath - Urbanized

https://nick_stath.artstation.com/projects/xJPG4X

I want to give special thanks to Ryan Bown of University of Utah's Entertainment Arts and Engineering program for giving me the space needed to tackle such a project and his insightful feedback and encouragement. This project far exceeded what I imagined i could achieve at the start and has dramatically expanded my knowledge of Unreal and the Environment Art process.

Additional thanks to Jeremy Hodges of Tripwire Interactive for all the great feedback and magic words I never knew I needed to complete this project.