The Old Ruins | The Bayou | Prop and Environment Work

The Old Ruins 

"The Old Ruins" is an environment art project that was created with a focus on creating a fantasy environment that still felt grounded and realistic. The purpose of this project was to focus on strengthening my foliage creation skills within Speedtree and strengthening my personal photogrammetry pipeline using Houdini and Reality Capture. As a result, the scene was created using a combination of photogrammetry, manual modelling and manual sculpting to create the various assets.

I knew that the scene was going to be heavily populated by foliage, so making a wide variety of foliage assets was extremely important in creating a realistic biome. This meant producing multiple variants for each species of plant and tree within the scene. I usually focus on getting my asset to 70% completion using a custom Speedtree recipe to procedurally create the tree and focus on applying manually adjustments and tweaks to finalise the asset and finish the last 30%

Most of the foliage was captured with a cross-polarised photogrammetry setup, where the leaves were then manually processed to obtain the clean texture maps required. However, the season of my project didn't match the current season in England - so I manually sculpted and textured some assets to create certain plants and leaves that weren't available to capture at that time.

The tree assets range from 8K to 35K Triangles

Photogrammetry is a technique that I have been honing recently and have incorporated various software into my personal photogrammetry pipeline. This includes the use of Houdini to speed up the time spent cleaning and UVing the lowpoly model. My photogrammetry process consists of a few individual stages:

1. Obtaining clean images using a cross-polarised setup

2. Clean-up and delighting the images inside of Lightroom

3. Processing the raw data in Reality Capture

4. Manually cleaning issues on the highpoly in Zbrush

5. Creating the lowpoly in Zbrush before manually fixing topology

6. Using my custom Houdini tool to automatically UV the asset

7. Re-projecting the textures onto the UV'd lowpoly in Reality Capture, before cleaning and enhancing the textures in Substance Painter

The photogrammetry assets range from 800 Triangles to 10K Triangles

Bound By Blood - Environment

"Bound By Blood" is an Unreal Engine 5 cinematic produced by a group of artists during our final year at University. It has been an incredible experience working with such a talented group of artists, whilst also producing a cinematic narrative that we have been so passionate about. My main responsibilities included environment layout, environment asset and foliage creation, shader creation, Unreal Engine cinematography, motion capture recording, video editing and partial audio editing in DaVinci. Below are some Hero Shots of my environment work and some breakdowns of the foliage and props. 

Lighting By: Diana Karakushyan (https://www.artstation.com/sabretooth)

The Swamp Bald Cypress tree variants were created within Speedtree using a shared custom recipe to create the classic aesthetic of the tree. This was then manually developed for each individual variant - creating different trunk shapes and tree silhouettes allowing for the creation of a dense and varied biome when used within the environment. This is important as each tree silhouette has an intended use to create a specific look to the forest. The Bald Cypress Tree variants range from 18K Triangles to 35K Triangles.

The leaves were captured using stereo photo photogrammetry and were then used to create the branch cards and clusters that fill the trees. Photogrammetry was also used to capture the bark texture, before manually cleaning and editing the photos to create a tileable 1X2 texture - which reduces tiling on the trunk. 

 Both weapon props are game-ready assets that use one 4K texture set each (a slightly higher triangle count was used as the props are used within an Unreal Engine 5 cinematic). The Smith and Wesson Model 3 Revolver uses 20K triangles and the Remmington Modle 1883 uses 15K Triangles. Both weapons were modelled using the Maya to Zbrush boolean workflow, allowing for the creation of some very complicated forms.

Real world reference was gathered from multiple museum visits to gain a better understanding of the weapons' history and design. This was especially useful when it came to texturing as I had a stronger understanding of the materials used across the weapon and how they are affected over time and use.

Bound By Blood Cinematic Credits:

 https://linktr.ee/BoundByBlood

Third Party Assets (The Old Ruins Environment):

Ground Textures: Megascans, Quixel - ttps://quixel.com/megascans

Third Party Assets (Bound By Blood Bayou Environment):

Fog Cards: Easy Fog, William Faucher - https://www.unrealengine.com/marketplace/en-US/product/easyfog

Animal Skull Mesh (textures were used as a base before custom texturing), Animal Bones Mesh (textures were used as a base before custom texturing), Ground Textures, Plank Textures, Roof Tile Texture: Megascans, Quixel - https://quixel.com/megascans

Skeleton: Male Human Skeleton, Conor Jordan - https://www.artstation.com/artwork/nYzdzK

Skulls for Environment Assets were sculpted by Charlie Shrehorn Middleton - https://www.artstation.com/charlie-shrehorn_middleton

Third Party Assets (Weapon Prop Diorama):

Background Assets for Weapon Diorama: Megascans, Quixel - https://quixel.com/megascans