Philipp Buck - Student Demo Reel April 2024

Hello everyone!

I'm Philipp Buck, 20 years old, and I recently graduated from PIXL VISN media arts academy. During my time there, I discovered my passion for lighting, lookdev, and environment art.

I'm excited to share my student demo reel, which I've been working on for the past five months. So, let's dive right in:

Project 01 | The lost Spaceship

Working on this project has been a lot of fun. It allowed me to learn new things in Unreal Engine, especially about landscapes, effects, and creating more complex materials. These new skills have significantly improved my understanding of the software. I generally enjoy working with Unreal Engine because it lets you see the process in real-time, bringing the creative aspect to the forefront.

The spaceship was modeled and textured by Talia Bazzi.

Concept and Reference

It was clear from the start that this project would be a desert environment. However, I decided to include larger cliffs to cover most of the ground in the background, allowing me to focus more on the important areas and the final look of the scene. Therefore, I looked for references of deserts with cliffs.

Environment

Creating the environment was a straightforward process. I started by building the landscape and its material, then placed the spaceship. After that, I set up the cameras and positioned the larger cliffs I got from Megascans. In the next step, I added additional assets like rocks, plants, boulders, etc. , beginning with the larger ones and then moving on to the smaller details. The assets in the background were placed using PCG (Procedural Content Generation), while those in the foreground were positioned individually. For all assets that are close to the camera, I used RVTs (Runtime Virtual Textures) to smoothly blend the materials of the assets with the landscape material.

Effects

After I had most of the environment done, I created some effects such as blowing sand, heat haze and smoke to make the scene look more believable.

The blowing sand effect consists of three parts. The first part is a sphere attached to the camera, which has an additive material with two animated noise textures that are multiplied, and another animated noise texture added on top to simulate sand grains. All these textures offset in the opposite direction of the camera movement to create the illusion that the sand moves with the camera. These textures are also distance and height blended to simulate actual height and depth.

In addition to the sphere, I also added another landscape texture, which is masked by two animated noise textures that multiply each other to simulate blowing sand at ground level. The last part of the blowing sand effect is a volumetric material, which uses mesh distance fields multiplied by an animated 3D noise texture to connect the assets with the blowing sand.

The heat haze effect is a simple refractive material with animated noise textures as the input for the IOR (Index of Refraction) value. This material is assigned to cards placed in the background.

The smoke effect is a simple Niagara system.

Rendering & Compositing

This project was rendered with Lumen in Unreal Engine 5.

I used Nuke for color correction and to add post effects such as lens distortion, glow, chromatic aberration, and more.

From an unreal render to a nuke render:

Project 02 | Murder at the motel

Working on this project was fun as well, especially the lighting stage, which offered plenty of room for creativity. Additionally, the work was very varied because I decided to merge an exterior and interior environment into one project, which was also time-consuming. Speaking of time, I always found things I could improve, and it was difficult for me not to get lost in the details.

Concept and Reference

The original idea came from one of the mentors at Pixl Visn. I chose to do the environment during nighttime to have more opportunities for artificial lighting. To create an exciting atmosphere, I decided to include a crime scene and a police car. I collected references to better understand the structure of motels and to find concepts that matched the mood I was aiming for.

Modeling and setting up the environment

I started by roughly blocking out the scene and placing cameras. After refining the blockout and animating the cameras, I began adding details to the main building and modeling its assets, such as doors, windows, air vents, railings, etc.. Luckily, these objects were repetitive, so I could simply duplicate them. Next, I UV unwrapped the objects and offset the UV shells of the duplicated assets so they could be textured individually. To further fill the scene, I created more objects and also placed downloaded assets (see credits).

From a wireframe render, to clay a render, to a clay render with downloaded assets:

Texturing and Shading

The larger objects were textured procedurally in Maya using tileable textures, noises, curvatures, dirts, and more, allowing me to apply them easily without worrying about texture resolution. Later in the process, I used texture projections to add more details such as road lines, graffiti, blood splatter, etc.

For the smaller assets, I used Substance Painter as it is easier to use and saves a lot of time.

Lighting

Because I chose a nighttime lighting condition, I started by adding a dome light with a nighttime HDRI functioning as a fill light. Since nighttime scenarios allow for plenty of artificial lighting, I placed IES lights in the lamps of the motel building and point lights in the streetlamps. I increased the color temperature of both light types and slightly varied some of them to create the impression that the light bulbs had been changed over time. Then, I placed area lights in some of the rooms to make the motel look used. Next, I added area lights for the police car lights and animated their rotation. The light from the motel sign on the roof was created with mesh lights and self-illumination. In the final step of the lighting stage, I placed some dimmer lights to add detail and made rough adjustments to all the existing lights.

Rendering & Compositing

This project was rendered using V-Ray for Maya. 

I organized the lights into different lightgroups for better control and added back-to-beauty AOVs to those lightgroups. Additionally, I included utility AOVs such as cryptomatte, zDepth, and more. In Nuke, I recombined all the back-to-beauty AOVs and light groups to have full control over the adjustments. Next, I added a background, which I quickly created in Unreal Engine and adjusted it to fit the render. Finally, I made further adjustments, color correction and added post effects like lens distortion, glow, chromatic aberration, vignette, and more.

Project 03 | Industrial Area

This project was the most experimental of the three, especially during the lighting stage, as I had never created a day-night cycle in V-Ray before. However, I'm pleased with the results. Additionally, the project required more modeling than I initially anticipated, making it quite time-consuming. Despite this, I thoroughly enjoyed working on it and further improving my modeling and texturing skills.

Concept and Reference

The idea originally came from a game called Standoff 2, where I randomly stumbled over this environment. I was immediately drawn to its industrial and dilapidated look, so I decided to use this location as a concept for my scene assembly. I then made a list of assets I needed to create and gathered references for each one. The idea of a day-night cycle emerged later in the process, as I couldn't decide whether the lighting scenario should be during the daytime or nighttime. So, I decided to incorporate both.

Modeling and setting up the environment

I began by roughly blocking out the scene and placing cameras. After refining the blockout and animating the cameras, I started adding details to the buildings and modeling the necessary assets for the environment. As previously mentioned, modeling these assets took more time than expected, but I reused several of them to further fill the scene. The modeling process itself was straightforward, as the assets were not too complex. Next, I UV unwrapped the objects and offset the UV shells of the duplicated assets so they could be textured individually. Finally, I added a few downloaded assets (see credits) to further populate the scene.

From a clay render, to a wireframe render:

Clay and wireframe turntable of the assets I modeled:

Texturing and Shading

Once again, the larger objects like the ground and buildings were procedurally textured in Maya using a combination of tileable textures, noises, curvatures, dirts, and more. This approach made it easy to apply textures without concerns about texture resolution. As the project progressed, I employed texture projections to add additional details such as graffiti and dirt spots.

For the remaining assets, I used Substance Painter as it is easier to use and its time-saving capabilities.

Beauty turntable of the assets I modeled and textured:

Lighting

As previously mentioned, the lighting stage was the most experimental aspect of the project due to the day-night cycle. But I ended up using two render layers: one for daytime lighting and another for nighttime lighting.

For the daytime lighting, I use a V-Ray Sun and Sky system, animating the sun to simulate a sunset. For the nighttime lighting, I started with a Light Dome featuring a nighttime HDRI and animated it to create a timelapse effect. Next, I placed IES lights, area lights, and point lights in the lamps, adjusting their parameters to match the various lamp types. I also added dimmer lights to enhance detail and made rough adjustments to all the existing lights. The effect of the lights turning on was done in Nuke using light groups.

Rendering & Compositing

This project was rendered using V-Ray for Maya. 

I began by organizing the lights into different lightgroups for better control and added back-to-beauty AOVs for these groups. Additionally, I added utility AOVs such as cryptomatte, zDepth, and more. In Nuke, I recombined all the back-to-beauty AOVs and lightgroups for each render layer to have full control over the adjustments. Next, I blended the daytime and nighttime render layers to achieve a smooth transition between day and night. I then animated the light groups to simulate the effect of lights turning on. After that, I added a background, which I quickly created in Unreal Engine and adjusted to fit the render. Finally, I made further adjustments, performed color correction, and added post effects like lens distortion, glow, chromatic aberration, vignette, and more.

Credits