The Seer's Offering

The Seer's Offering

This is my recent project for the 4 week  environment art course I made in Unreal Engine 5. Using a 'dark academia' aesthetics and semi-realistic style, I have tried to capture the atmosphere of a cult in a church, drawing inspiration from David Martos's concept, 'The New Oracle.' I wanted to challenge myself with creation of modular pieces, as well as trim sheets with ornament elements for arcs and pillars. 

The scene was modelled in Blender, trim sheets were made in Blender/Substance Designer and Zbrush. I wanted to play around with light and make it mysterious, but also not to go away from the original concept. I also wanted to try out creation and implementation of stained glass windows. In the end I added rose petals and candles to give a little life for the environment. 

David Martos's concept check here

Recording a cinematic in Unreal Engine 5 was a thrilling endeavor. Utilizing height fog and Lumen technologies, I created detailed environments with dynamic lighting. I also enjoyed playing around with Unreal Engine's Sequencer tool that provided precise control over camera movements, animations, and post-processing.

Music: Rivers Run Red by Christoffer Moe Ditlevsen

The cathedral concept's mood captivated me instantly. The contrasting play of darkened interiors and streaming sunlight evoked a breathtaking ambiance. It was an easy choice to work on this project. My aim was to create an oil painting-like effect that preserved the original concept's essence while enhancing colors.

Work Progress:

Light

The stunning lighting was my main goal. I aimed to experiment with god rays, reflections from stained glass, and dust particles floating in the light streaming through the windows. At the same time I wanted to preserve the original lighting concept while incorporating dynamic light from the Cathedral's open sides.

Modular

Working on modular was a quite interesting experience, since I did it for the first time. I had quite limited amount of time to work on the project (4 weeks) I wanted to use time efficiently. So I had to plan my trim sheets carefully, as well as base material, besides modular assets itself. Attention to details, effective planning and prototyping were vital. The outcome: a versatile modular building system

Mesh

Efficiently optimizing modular pieces was my objective. Balancing visual quality and performance, I carefully analyzed and simplified geometry, reducing polycount without sacrificing details. Precise alignment ensured seamless integration and created a cohesive whole while maintaining optimal efficiency. The optimization and modeling was made in Blender

Trim sheets

To enhance optimization, I utilized trim sheets that I created using Substance Designer, Zbrush and Blender. By creating a single texture atlas with multiple trim patterns, I achieved efficient use of UV space and reduced the need for additional textures. This approach streamlined the rendering process, resulting in optimized modular pieces with improved performance and visual consistency.

"Programming" (Blueprints)

Additionally I wanted to give a little extra effects to the scene, so I started to work on VFX : mist, dust particles, and flickering candle lighting. The flame I created as a dynamic material, and then implemented it in Blueprint, using a simple code that allowed to flicker the light inside a blueprint of the candle. In order to create a stain glass effect, I used simple plane with projected texture material, that was combined with 3 different lights in a blueprint.

Moodboard

For my moodboard, in order to help me to understand the cathedral more I collected interesting elements for the arches, the breakdown of the modular pieces, roof, columns, and lamps, and the behavior of the light since the concept leaves some space for interpretation of some corners and aesthetic details. The inspiration for the characters I took from "The Handmaid's Tale", with their red cloak and white hood, as I thought it will match best the original concept. 

Clash of beliefs

The Nordic theme is my favorite topic, which I love to work with and always go back to for inspiration. I always wanted to recreate a stave church from Norway, runestones, and some snow environment. All this I combined into this scene. I used Zbrush, Substance Painter, and Unreal Engine 5 to create it, which took  5 weeks.

The "Clash of Beliefs" is a story of two different religions, that have to coexist in one tiny space, as a contrast one to another, the old and new, as the light and shadow.

This diorama was both modeled and sculpted in Zbrush, using Zmodeler for modeling the church, and other hard surface models.

Work Progress:

Light

The lighting in the "Clash of Beliefs" was planned as the night winter scene with a beautiful glow from the church windows and the torches that light everything around as an idea of the contrast between light and shadows, warm and cold lights as the distinction between old pagan gods and Christianity. Besides, I added the northern lights in the background for the richness of the atmosphere

Sculpting

 I challenged myself to learn to work with Zmodeler for modeling the hard surface and build a church but other pieces such as stones, crosses, the cliff, snow, and the runestones were sculpted. As my goal was to recreate close to original rune scripts, I used alphas from photos of Swedish rune's cultural heritage to make carvings more accurate on sculpted runes.

Mesh

In order to make showcase the assets in Unreal, I optimized them in Blender. After retopology and UV unwrapping, I used Substance Painter where I baked (low + high poly) and textured assets for the scene, except snow, which I textured using Quixel Mixer.

Assets

Additional props for the scene were created in Blender.  Both, sculpted and modeled assets have been textured in Substance Painter. To make the mood more "Nordic" I created snow particles in Niagara and Aurora Borealis as shader material and used planes in different forms that would bend accordingly.

Thank you for reading! 

Here is my artstation