Journey through enviroment/prop art

Thank you for stopping by, my name is Luke van Klooster. I'm a Dutch prop/environment artist currently studying at Digital Arts and Entertainment, Kortrijk.
I would like to take you along in some of my projects.

Stalo 3M tape measure

I wanted to create a hero prop that may not be as common as a gun or other props. While i was digging through my dads toolbox for something i stumbled upon this little guy. It's been living around in his toolbox for years and it has a lot of neat stories to tell with the wear and tear and other details it has. So i decided that this would be the subject of choice.

I started with making a midpoly to nail down the proportions of the tape measure. For some of the bigger  details i made a high poly model to bake ontop of the lowpoly. For some of the mesh i ran into some issues where it would create very strong normal shading errors if i condenced the mesh to much. So i worked around those areas and tried to optimize the mesh in a way that the normal shading errors would show as little as possible or got rid of them entirely.

Zone 49

My first project getting used to creating a level from start to finish, i faced a lot of challanges with getting the scene to look interesting, making sure the lights led the player and it overall had a consistent feeling. 
I unfortunetly didn't have the time to shoot a new video of the entire level as i reworked the lighting after some great feedback i got from Vander Meiren Sander. But i still wanted to show some finished shots of the level's main rooms.

Before i even got started on the level i wanted to do a little bit of a research on the type of level and style i wanted to go with. The evntual piece was based on the artwork of Nicolas Souclier. I always loved the vibe and the way GTFO depicts it's light and makes thir sceneries pop. So i tried to recreate this vibe, i'm not fully convinced i nailed it but i did learn a lot about working with lights and studying how the game handles this aspect. 

The entire enviroment is build up using simple meshes, apart from these meshes i also used some megascans assets for concrete rubble and seaweed to create the alien "plants". Some textures are also sourced from textures.com.

Shader breakdown

I want to bring back some attention to the shader i used for the glitching effect.
i wasn't sure how to go about the distortion effect at first so i started to dig around and found a tutorial by Meshigun Studio. However this only covered a simple deformation and the flickering but i needed more. So i got to work.

The effect lacked any of the RGB layer destortions and would only distort the image as a whole. I made it so the effect would keep the original image the same and glitch out the RGB channels seperately. i added a simple noise ontop to create some subtle variation.

Although it got closer to the effect i wanted i wasn't satisfied yet, normally when a glitch appears some pixel rows are drastically more offset then others. This was the big lottery ticket i needed to enhance this effect more. It is used on most of the screens but as i do not have a video that showcases the entire level at this time i wanted to highlight the existence of this shader. As well as give anyone stumbling onto this page the opportunity to recreate the effect as i created it using existing knowledge from someone else.

All of the colors, direction of the glitch, distortion and screen tear amount is fully controllable by the user, and most textures can be swapped out for more personalization.

Archway to the hills

After creating zone 49 I wanted to put in more practice into my real time lighting after receiving some valuable feedback from several lighting / enviroment artists about it. So i set out to light a scene with a single directional light and an accompanying skylight using an HDRi i got from polyhaven.com. 

This scene was created using unreal engine 5.1 and uses megascans assets.

To get the distance fade effect i used an Exponential Height Fog, but it wasn't giving me the result i was looking for. So i looked for possibly adding a different kind of fog or adding a secondary heightfog, i eventually stumbled upon a method using the post process volume. So i set to work on creating the distance fog material that keeps the camera distance in mind and overlays a cloud texture with opacity the further away something goes. Along with the help of some cloud cards it created this very nice almost painterly effect.

The ground consists of an unreal landscape with a few textures on it, however this can become quitte expensive the larger the terrain is and the more assets you have it can result in running out of memory from loading in all these textures. To make sure this scene can be as optimized for in game use as possible i made sure that all the textures used inside of the landscape had their source sampling set to Shared:wrap. This makes sure all of the textures used get all called at once instead of individually. 

If there are any questions regarding the projects, technicalities or if you wish to give me some feedback i would love to hear! Thank you for checking out my work.