Hayden McManus - 3D Environment Portfolio 2024

*Eastern Block Garrison*

The beginning of this project has its origins in my freshman year of college with the idea that I had for a summer project that never saw the light of day. Originally I had planned on making a game-ready T-72 which I had put a lot of work into throughout the summer of 2022, but it ended up blowing up in my face with very little proper time spent on it and little to no outcome worthy of a post. The Tank then Reared its ugly head once more as a challenge when I started my advanced sem this past spring, and that challenge was thusly accepted.

The work of this project required me to do vehicle Modeling which I had only attempted once before, and had me base my work on a concept piece called COD: Black Ops - Cold War - Garrison - Warehouse Interior Concept 2 by Kevin Jick. Referencing the concept art and making an environment that feels unique was a definite challenge and was a lot of fun. This project was a major test for the interior lighting and prop placement and the Substance Designer pipeline. Being able to improve my skills over the past three years has been a blast and taking on challenges that took me 3 months to finish in the past in a matter of weeks was exhilarating. 

Creating a tank that felt used and also cared for was a difficult and timely process and definitely was a time-consuming part of the project. I spent a long time on the main painted steel material seen on the tank the most and felt that the outcome was worth it for that nice gleaming but still worn coat of green paint. 

The materials were a very fun part of this project and required me to jump into Substance Designer more complexly than I had previously. the brick had been made one time before for a previous project so I decided to take what I had learned from that and revamp it and bring the quality up to par with my modeling. The walls of the garrison needed to look like they had been hand-placed brick with the mentality of it being rushed, so I felt the need to make a second brick Texture. This second brick texture displayed here has motor overflowing parts of the wall allowing for the placement of it in vertex paint so that it could be placed strategically to avoid repetition in the walls. 

The final Designer material was the concrete floor. this needed to look rough and worn with the idea that people started to use the ground almost as soon as the floor had even slightly dried. This surprisingly was more difficult than the brick. This required a lot of notes and tile samples to achieve this look, but in the end, it was worth it. This concrete texture paired with another made-in substance and vertex painted in the scene allowed for the floor to be more varied in its colors and depth.

The end of this project brought about the culmination of all these skills used previously on other projects from the year. The project was much more than a test of my skills but the test of my ability to balance work, school, and personal life. This project taught me not just a lot about lighting but also a lot about how to work effectively and efficiently. 

The project used assets made in Maya, Substance Painter/Designer only created by me, and put together in Unreal 5.3. the scene utilizes decals from the Unreal Megascans library and an HDRI sphere from PolyHaven.

*Smuggler's Office*

The beginning of this project was meant to test my ability to adapt and keep quality with a strict time frame set on me with only 4-5 weeks to complete the assignment with finals wrapping up while also following off the base of a concept art piece. 

With this scene, my goal was to create a space that had a test of my skills as a modeler, texture artist, and lighting artists. I wanted to continue to increase my modeling speed and texturing speed to truly see how fast I could get a project like this done. 

The process of creating realistic breakage from a style of a building made at the turn of the century was a difficult one and required a lot of references to old homes and office buildings from the time that still stood today and had their walls opened up, which was not easy to find. The way wood splinters and breaks was very important very early on in the creation of the scene and would stay that way for almost the entire project seeing countless interactions of splinters and wood grain. This final effect was created using a mixture of small low poly cubes and vertexes put into the planks to pull back from the flattened front to make harsh and devastating breaks in the wood.

The lighting of the scene was a major focus for me and required ruthless attention to detail with how it would affect items in the room. The main lights are two stacked spotlights with one having ray tracing and no volumetric and the other the opposite to achieve the effect of dust settling in the moonlight. The combination of blue and orange was a risk from the very start and thankfully was very successful.

one of the key insights I had in creating the walls was my own grandmother's house which had similar paneling with large wood planks encasing plaster and wood beams. The ability to use this real-life reference for a structure like this was indispensable. 

This project was meant for me to push lighting and learn from my mistakes from past projects for interior lighting. I feel that I learned more about my process during this period and feel that after this assignment I can knock some socks off in the future. I enjoyed being able to do a project like this that put me out of my norm and made me rethink certain modeling techniques. Through this project, I used grudges made both by me and from Unreal's Quixle Bridge. The original concept art was made by, Chahat Bavanya on artstation.

All props and 3D models are made by me with the use of Maya, Substance Painter/Designer, Zbrush, and Marvelous Designer. Assembly of the scene was carried out in Unreal Engine 5.3. All decals and grudges were created using Unreal Megascans.

*Calm in the Storm*

Over the past year, I have gotten engrossed in the world of environment art and wanted to find a way to create a world that feels alive and lived in. This project was my attempt at making a playable outdoor environment in The Unreal Engine, without the utilization of nanite. This project was inspired by the fields of France during World War One. This project was a school assignment but nonetheless, it was a passion project through and through, being able to use my love of history and my old research tools to make a realistic and compelling world was a pleasure. 

The entire world is made up of a total of props, buildings, and foilage entirely made by me through 3DS Max, Substance Painter/Designer, TreeIt, and Unreal Engine. All of the used models in the scene total up to 58k Triangles which was specified by our teacher. The process of making a scene playable, game-ready, and realistic at the end of all that required a lot of references. I referenced games like Battlefield 1, Verdun, and Hell let loose.  These references mixed with footage from movies like They Shall Not Grow Old and other wartime photos, helped establish the realism and the grand scale I had to create for this environment.

The major brunt of the project was learning modularity for buildings and homes. The stable and homes have many components that allow for easy change and variation in the setup and placement of the buildings. The next hurdle was the process of learning Substance Designer on my own with only the guidance of YouTube and other forum posts. Every texture scene within the scene does not have a single baked texture everything in the world is based on tile sheets and decals.

This scene taught me a lot about set dressing and the tools in the Unreal engine, like vertex painting, talking textures, landscaping tools, and blueprint navigation. Throughout this project, I learned more about the field I want to pursue than I had in any other project and it couldn't have made me more excited. 

All props and 3D models are made by me with the use of 3DS Max Substance Painter/Designer, and Marvelous Designer. Assembly of the scene was carried out in Unreal Engine 5.3. All decals and grudges were created using Photoshop.

Shout out to all the recent Champlain graduates and Alumni for helping me out through all of these projects, wouldn't be the same without yall!

Another special thanks to Jennifer Carlin for the support and mentorship this past semester, my lighting would look far worse without her guidance.

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Thank you all for checking out my submission!

If you'd like to see more of my work, here is my Artstation.