3D portfolio

So, this is the last chance to participate to the Rookies. I've picked out three of my favorite 3D projects I made for school assgnments or during my free time.
I present to you you my most recent and so far my best project:

The Town of Sleepy Valley

I absolutely adore this piece. I can still look back to it and be really proud of myself.
It's an outdoorsy scene in Ghibli style made in Unreal Engine 5, completely inspired by Jourdan Tuffan's 2D piece. I wanted my 3D scene to look as close as possible to the reference. And it worked out pretty well! Some people can't tell the difference at first glance.

Below, there are 3 pictures that represent the building blocks of my scene: Models and textures.

1. All models are low poly and modular. There was no need to go through the whole pipeline to create high quality assets.

2. To color in my scene, I had a combination of materials for big surfaces such as walls, rooftiles and floors, and a sculpted trimsheet that I mainly used for wooden & metal objects, or bricks. I also used a material layering technique to have a more unique texture for the bricks by combining it with the plaster.

3. Near the end of the process of my scene, I had some fun with creating the final little props and foliage. 
I made two extra hand painted texture sheets for this.
As for the forest in the background, I made use of Unreal's landscaping and foliage tool to create the mountains and the dense forest with very simple tree shapes.

Below you can see the process from a basic blockout to my final render.

As for lighting, I used a single directional light with a slightly warm hue, and some rectangular lights to brighten the dark spaces in the foreground.
A blue-tinted exponential heigh fog was added in the background. The clouds and mist were manually painted onto plane meshes.

I've often received the question "But how did you make it look so 2D?"
You've probably noticed there is some shader work going on. In the post-processsing, I applied 2 different materials, one in the background and one in the foreground, depending on the scene depth.

In the background, I applied a Kuwahara filter shader, which gives the scene a blurry, painterly appearance.
In the foreground is a simple outline material.

I gave my piece some life by adding some leaves and wind particles, plus a wind effect in the material of the foliage and flags.

Vendibot

This is a project where I also had so much fun making it, but this time, it's a game asset: The Vendibot.

When I was trying to find an interesting concept, the design from Omercan Cirit immediately caught my eye.
It's a game-ready prop, where I used the full pipeline to create a high quality asset: I used 3Ds max for modeling the low poly version, Zbrush for the high poly and Substance painter for baking and creating the textures, with the presentation done in Unreal Engine 4.

Aside from that, I wanted the prop to feel more alive, so I did some shader work to create the hologram effect, plus, I animated the drinks in Houdini (more about this below).

Here are some extra shots of the model without textures + the wireframe.

One thing that I would change in this project would be the poly density of some of the smaller objects, especially at the bottom, it could have been a little more optimised.

For the tech-lovers among you, I added a couple of screenshots of my animation workflow within Houdini.

I spawned points along three seperate curves, I made sure I could manually animate each of the curves seperately with a slider, and instanced my drink models on those points.
I made an hda out of it, where I only exported the already animated points, so I could drag my meshes into the hda slots, and voila! All done.

The last slide containts a screenshot of the shader for the hologram.

Old Luxurious Bath House

This project might be a little older since it was made in UE4, but still one of my loveliest environments.
It was the first environment I made where I was really proud of myself for the first time. 
It's done without a specific concept, but with a scene I had in my mind, plus some help of real life references. The main goal was to practise lighting.

(please watch the video below with sound on)

The pipeline is quite similar to what I've written before:

The models are all low poly, back then I didn't have a clue yet how to make high quality assets.
All the big assets were made by myself: walls, windows, doors, pillars, trims, ..
The smaller assets such as the plants or other props, these are from Unreal marketplace, downloaded for free.

Some of the materials were made in Substance Designer, such as the marble or the bricks. This was my first time touching Substance in general. Other additional materials were downloaded from Quixel Bridge.

I created a water shader and a material function for the caustic reflections with the help of Ben Cloward's tutorials. These effects really helped bringing the scene to life.

Eventually, dust & leaf particles and the fires were added, made by myself with the Niagara system.

I apologize for how the foliage is looking here. I didn't have a clue how to make foliage look good back then. It's something I only realised after.

A detailed lighting shot below.
There is one directional sunlight + rectangular lights to light up the dark spaces. All lights are set to static for optimisation purposes.

The scene is as optimised as possible for my skills back then. It's completely walkable, with no framedrop at all.

At last, below you can find small inspiration board of different bath houses all over the world.

I will forever treasure these projects. There are definitely more 3D works to come in the future, the passion for it hasn't died at all, and hopefully will never be.
Feel free to check out my artstation, I have quite some illustrations on there as well if you're interested.

Thank you for reading!