Swamp Haven | Elven Ascent

1. Swamp Haven

Happy to showcase what I've been working on in the past four months. Swamp Haven is a UE5 Game Environment which is a part of my Mentorship Term at Think Tank Online. Every asset in this project is made by myself, including the foliage. It has been a great journey to go even deeper into exploring Environment Art and I'm proud of what I've achieved in this period of time.

Slide the slider to see the day and night set ups below ↓

Swamp Haven - Breakdown

Here's the Swamp Water Shader that I made:

I worked upon my water shader in this project and added more features to it in order to suit the swampy environment. Aside from the small, subtle waves, I added distance-based fungi and sine ripples which are customizable to one's liking.

The Dome Tents

Designing these Dome Tents was a fun task since I had to come up with something unique which resembles the dome tent in the concept while at the same time being optimized and usable for games. So I came up with a modular design which allows me to create multiple variations (The modular parts are shown in the breakdown above).

The modular fabric parts were simulated in Marvelous Designer (shown below).

The coolest thing about these Dome Tents is that they are customizable which means I can change the cloth pattern according to my liking thus creating multiple different tents of different colors and I can also change the amount of dirt buildup that goes on these tents (as shown in a video below).

Here's The Multi Purpose Master Material that I made in Unreal Engine:

Throughout this whole environment I'm making use of my master material which was built with keeping baked maps and engine generated masks in mind. This allows me to texture every asset aside from the hero props inside the engine itself thus being more flexible and saving a ton of time.

This material makes use of distance fields and distance based approx. AO to generate dirt and moss build up inside the engine itself (refer to shingles breakdown further below).

This allows me to have much greater control in art directing the whole scene and is an amazing feature of Unreal Engine.

Breaking down the Shingles:

Here's a breakdown of the above mentioned techniques in the master material which are being implemented on the roof shingles.

Note: If I were to not use this technique, manually baking such information would be unoptimized and heavy on performance since I would have to bake unique textures for unique assets.

World Position Based Random Tint Example

Here the shader can be used to give random tints to the instances thus allowing to break up multiple assets with the same material. This allows you to add more variation to your scene, ultimately increasing the final quality.

Combined examples of the methods described above on the wood material which are Random Tint based on X,Y,Z position, Distance Based buildup, Distance Based Approx. AO buildups with dirt/moss.

Some other misc. controls also exist which are Vertex paintable materials along with ability to control the intensity of baked normal, curvature, ao etc.

Experimental Dirt/Mud Blob Shader that I made:

A fun experiment that I came up with was this dirt/mud blob shader. Since I was on a schedule I could not add detailed mud/dirt as a geometry. So, a simple alternative was this shader which displaced the geometry using distance fields. This gives a quick and cheap method to add tertiary details to my scene.

It works by offsetting the vertices in X,Y, and Z directions based on how close the blob is to some other geometry (Mesh Distance fields). 

Here's a video showcasing the shader in action ↓

Niagara Moth Particles 

To add another another layer to this fantasy scene I added moths around bright lights which flap and move around realistically. Thankfully niagara particle system makes it easy to make such particles. To approach these:-

I first made an animated moth sprite which is just a shader offsetting the vertex position of the moth card using a sine wave in object Z direction.

I can now use these animated sprites as my particles in niagara system that I created to give a convincing result as shown below.

Timelapse

Swamp Haven: Substance Designer Showcase

Here are some of the interesting procedural textures that I made for this project. 

High Poly Detailed Sculpts

Here are all the detailed sculpts that I made for this project.

Foliage Breakdown

To approach foliage, I first planned the layout of the atlas according to a 2048 x 2048 textured plane.

Then I took the base mesh in ZBrush to create all the nice details which were required for a nice bake.

After doing so the high poly mesh was baked onto a plane in Substance Painter and then made into cards in Maya.

Furthermore I assembled my foliage according to real-world plant references in Maya using those cards. 

The concept art for the above project was taken from the following Artstation post. Unfortunately the name of the original artist is not mentioned anywhere on the internet. 

https://www.artstation.com/artwork/OGalW6

2. Elven Ascent

Here's my Advanced Term project that I worked on for four months at Think Tank. I enjoyed creating this Elven House from the concept that I chose. During this term I was introduced to new and advanced techniques for creating game ready optimized assets. I was responsible for everything in this project as well and enjoyed making everything!

Some Close-up shots:

Elven Ascent - Breakdown

Elven Ascent - Substance Designer Textures

Trim Sheet Texture

I made a trim sheet texture in Substance Designer which is used for the round platform and also for corners of the flat platform in general. 

Here's a video showcasing the texture:- 

Procedural Foliage Generators that I made in Substance Designer:

Here are some videos showcasing all the cool procedural generators that I made for the foliage that I created for this project.

I made these in order to get an infinite amount of variations for my foliage atlas. These generators ended up being really useful because they are flexible and can be customized to one's liking!

Water Shader

Vertex Paintable Wood

The concept art for the above project was by the the following concept artist named 'Z L'

https://www.artstation.com/artwork/q9wwgn