Azurean Depths

Introduction

During the summer before graduation, me and my friend Stef Bracke worked together to create this immersive underwater scene in Unreal Engine 5. We both wanted to make a big portfolio piece before starting the hunt for our first job, so it was the perfect opportunity to combine our ideas and take on the challenge together.

In Azurean Depth, I was responsible for art side- the assets, foliage and creature creation, as well as the texturing, shaders and Niagara particles. Stef focused on the more technical aspects, since we wanted to create a procedurally generated coral reef. The project took a lot of research since I wanted to be as accurate as possible with the different types of vegetation and animals within the reef. 

For the presentation, i used Unreal Engine’s Virtual Cameras and Livelink to film sequences from my ipad that were connected to my scene, to make these realistic scuba diver shots. It was a really fun and rewarding experiment and i’m really happy with how these turned out! 🐠🌊

Breakdown

I wanted to make sure that most, if not all of the assets were modular; I initially made individual coral parts which were then used to create an actual coral piece. Together with some rocks and foliage, i created coral assemblies that were then used in Stef's PCG to generate rock formations for the reef. 
The foliage was made by creating my own foliage atlas based of references i gained from images of sea grasses and other plants i found online, which I then used to create a handful of foliage assets.
The fish were sculpted in zBrush and textured in substance Painter before being put in some fish school particles.