The Rooted Vault

Welcome to my project, "The Rooted Vault."
This project was inspired by an artwork by Magnus Schramm.
"The Rooted Vault" aims to convey a sense of peace, seclusion, and harmony with nature. I handled every aspect of the scene and am grateful for the support and encouragement from my mentor, Declan Hart, my friends, and everyone for your support.

I began by planning all the elements in my scene during the reference phase itself, collecting references for every aspect of it.

I started by blocking out the scene in Maya

Here's a timelapse of my entire journey

I wanted to learn more about shaders and challenged myself. I made a procedural architectural shader for my pillars.
I also used that on my wood modular kit by just replacing the textures. It gave me a lot of control during the look development phase. Here's a look at what it does. 

For the tree trunks, roots, and fine roots, I sculpted everything in zbrush and I opted for an RGBA workflow . I made a master RGBA shader for them with more control over it. This gave me much more freedom to tweak textures, add color variations, layer dirt, and basically have complete control over the look of everything. It made Art directing all of the roots in the scene much easier!

And I used the standard sculpting, baking, and texturing process for my door. Here is a snapshot of that

The backdrop mountains were created using Gaea's powerful nodes. And for the moss clumps, I started by creating small hemisphere moss clumps in Maya and painted these clumps on my trunks using the foliage tool in Unreal.

Lighting

After setting up the whole scene, I wanted to try having both day and night scenarios.
For the day lighting, I used an HDRI backdrop as a fill light for the entire scene, and I used Unreal's rect and point lights throughout the scene based on my reference.
And for the night lighting, I wanted to pull in the moon's light as god rays to draw attention to the building. I also wanted to balance the cool blue tones with some warm yellows in the scene. At first, I tried placing candles near the building, but it didn't feel quite right to me. However, when I added fire to the wooden fence, it seemed to click into place. The whole process involved a lot of experimenting and adjustments, but I really enjoyed it.

Thank you!

Feel free to reach out to me!
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Email: [email protected]

Insta: https://www.instagram.com/rakesh__art/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rakesh-kumar2407/