The Hidden Portal

I've spent a few weeks this year creating this real-time level based on HeJi Yong's Forest Portal Concept.

(https://www.artstation.com/yeji_hong_art)

Models where made in Maya and sculpted and decimated in Zbrush.

For the hero assets, I'm using Nanite to handle the higher number of polys, since I'm using the sculpted high-poly straight in the engine.

Some of the assets use a world-aligned material with tiling textures, the others are baked in Painter.

 I've spent most of the time trying to get a single modular cliff looking good enough to use to build the surrounding Cliff faces.

The portal FX comes from the free Niagara Effects bundle from UE Marketplace.

The rocks were scattered using PCG, except for those which needed to be hand placed.

Tiling Textures were made in Designer.

Blockout and Iteration

I used megascan meshes and foliage with a plain texture to plan and outline the scale and positioning of my final meshes and iterated on different camera angles and lighting set-up, as showcased below.

Assets

Railing

To avoid noticable repetition, I created 3 versions of the railing mesh, going from clean, to destroyed. The shapes were created using the Curve Tool and Sweep Mesh in Maya, then the base mesh was brought in ZBrush to create the broken variations.

Portal

For the portal, I used a mix of World-Aligned (for the bricks) and my Trimsheet material to map out the details along the circle.

The medusa head was made in Zbrush, using a base human head with the snake-hook brush to extrude the hair.

 Illustrated below is the trim texture, along with the portal model and UV layout. 

Trims

A combination of basic floor trims (used as stand for the railings) and ornate trims )with dentils and more complex shapes) were used at the top and bottom of walls to add details to the models.

Organic Assets

For the Cliffs surrounding the area, I wanted to try to create a single modular rock asset which could be used over and over. I went back and forth a lot before I settled on a more simple shape, which translated well however it was rotated. This is one of the assets handled by nanite, so I could keep as much detail and definition on the rock shapes of the sculpt, plus Nanite took care of culling the triangles which were hidden from view by the rocks being mashed together.

I experimented with a more mossy material for the stone, but ended up using my main rock master material, so as to not pull too much of the focus off of the hero assets.

More organic assets, the rocks were sculpted in Zbrush and textured using a world-aligned tiling texture, the bushes were made in Speedtree for a previous project and reused.