Maximilian Jonas | Game Art Projects

Project 01 | Iron Dragon

As soon as I found Rock D.'s "What The Fuxk" Concept Art, I fell in love with it and felt the urge to create it as a 3D Game Asset. My main aim was to kick the Quality equal to Games such as Cyberpunk 2077 or Horizon Zero Dawn.

I created the model during my mentorship time with James Schauf, then later on finished the project up during my Demo-Reel time at School of Games to bring it to life in UE5. It was a really exciting journey as Post-Apocalyptic Sci-Fi scenarios are my favourite in fiction.

The Renders below are Ray-Traced at maximum Settings in UE5 with some post-production in Adobe Lightroom.

This was my main Reference by Rock D. + My PureRef Collection

Modeling

In Maya and ZBrush I went through different stages of modelling, constantly getting feedback from James, Friends & Family.

UE5 Optimisation & Texturing Preparation

Before going into the next steps, I took some time to check if all my naming conventions were matching on both low and high-poly so baking wouldn't give any errors. If all pivots were set to where I wanted them to and if certain parts could be decimated to a lower poly-count to make the mesh as performant as possible for UE5.

UVs & Texturing

For the UVs I took my time and tried to hide the seams wherever I could. Even though baking textures nowadays hides them pretty well, I wanted to get them laid out clean and well hidden, so close up renders don’t have anything uncanny visible.

Texturing was probably the most fun part about this project. I imported a separate texturing UV version to Substance 3D Painter using the UDIM workflow so I can paint across texture sets easily, using an Excel sheet I created in advance to know which UDIM corresponds to which UE Material Instance later on.

I started out by searching through the Substance Source library to get my base materials and assigned them to every piece to get my ground work in place.

By adding a few imperfections to get a feel for it and experimenting with different colour variations, I posted my favourites online, asking for opinions. The result was the majority voting for the blue-orange version.

For the main paint material I used what I’ve learned from Wes McDermott’s awesome Tutorial about peeling paint. Since my textures were going to be rendered in a real-time engine, I had to get all my created height information into the normal map. The “Height to Normal” filter proved to do an awesome job here. This way I was able to leverage all the power of Substance 3D Painter’s height map capabilities and use them as normal maps.
With this material I was able to freely paint chipped parts and damages, mixing it with smart masks and taking my time observing references to get believable weathering and damages.

Since imperfections are the most crucial part to get things to look real, I spent a lot of time creating rust, damage and dirt groups with masks. I decided to do it this way since I wanted to later export my painted masks to use them in Unreal Engine’s material.

Unreal Engine Scene Setup

Setting up the Unreal Project, I began by creating a folder structure and a first map, building a studio environment, setting up lights and post-processing to have a clean scene to work in when assembling everything.

Rigging & UE Control Rig

Since I wanted the back thrusters and wings to move in my cinematic, I decided to create a simple rig in Maya. Being a hard-surface piece, skinning and constraining this was done in no time, ready to be exported to UE and get a Control Rig.

Wrapping my head around Unreal’s Control Rig took a little time but turned out to be very intuitive and quick to set up. After a few tests animating each part and locking certain angles so no geometry is able to crash, I created a blueprint for the vehicle, adding Sockets to constrain my thruster flames Niagara system to the corresponding geometry later on.

Material Setup

For the material I decided to try a look-dev friendly path. My goal was to have the same control over values and colours as I was used to in Maya’s Arnold and its Layer RGB and Layer Float nodes.

I set it up by creating a master material with my substance painter masks layered with a Lerp. With the masks I was able to control the power, opacity and colour of the texture. Additionally, I added a mask for the overall colour of the paint and rust so I was able to change and tweak those values too in case I needed it.

Niagara System

Unreal Engine’s Niagara particle system was a big part of adding realism to the overall look and believability, so I spent a lot of time studying different approaches and ways of creating thrusters for spaceships.
I decided to go with an animated texture on a Mesh.  For the different thruster shapes I designed, I created matching shaped flames by using layered geometry as emitter shape, playing different textures on it.

Render Setup & Post Processing

For the final renders I used the Movie Render Queue and different Console Variables to push the quality to where I wanted it to. After I had a final look at my Post-Processing element editing my colour grading, motion blur and things like the DoF, I was ready to start additional Pathtracer Renders.

The final Images were exported as .EXR to maintain control over the raw colours for later editing in Adobe Premiere, Lightroom and Photoshop.

Below are additional breakdowns of the textures in Unreal Engine and the Wireframe

Below you can find the additional Path Traced Cinematic I created.
Personally I think the Ray-Traced Renders are already looking amazing, but I wanted to also try it this way.

Project 02 | Alchemy Sabotage

A little Project to practice stylized Environments from my time at School of Games. It was one of my graduation Projects.
My focus was to create a unique Realtime Environment and experiment with the boundaries of UE5

Reference

Initially I started the Model as a practice to try stylised modeling but fell in love with the vibe of it so I took it further and made it a Hero Asset in UE5.
The Environment is mainly consisting out of UE Marketplace Assets since there was not enough time to get into that aswell. All credit goes to Aleksandr Ivanov and TomkaGS.
I was responsible for the House, Boat and Assets around the House like Barrels and Crates.

I did the whole Model in Maya, adding imperfections and a high- & low-poly model to bake all the large bevels and keep a low poly-count.
For the UVs I tried to create as few UV sets as possible to have a performant Asset.

Texturing

All of the texturing was done in Substance Painter.
Since this was my first project in a stylised artstyle, I took a lot of time to observe movies and games that use a similar style as what I was aiming for.
I used a lot of smart masks and layer blending to build up the final materials. For future Projects I'd like to get into Substance Designer to make some materials myself to use them.

Below is a little breakdown of the final textures. In order its Base Color, Roughness, Specular, Metalness, Normal.
Since metallic objects work different, I used UE's Material Editor to substract my metallic channel from the other specular parts, so the surface pops more and has a more correct look to it.

Lighting Setup & Post-Processing

For the lighting of this scenery I wanted to go for a Moon lit night with the Sky already getting bright from Sunset. I spent some time to get the Sky Atmosphere and "Sun" in Unreal Engine to look like Night and a Moon. With the Post-Processing actor I then adjusted a lot of the regualar values for shadows and exposure to give a feel of a bright night or early day.

The final editing was done in Lightroom to add a vignette, aolor correction and slight corrections of brightness.

I also did a little Cinematic, rendered with ray-tracing and edited in Premiere

Conclusion

This is the result of my 2 Years at School of Games in Cologne. I've graduated as best of the year in class 2021 and went from knowing nothing about Game-Dev to creating assets and scenes that are both performant and good looking. I'm very happy with how far I've come and looking forward to whatever the future holds.

Thank you so much for taking your time to look at my projects!
Any feedback, comment or high-five is greatly appreciated :)

Good luck to everyone participating this year and looking forward to see all the other awesome projetcs.

You can get in touch with me via:  LinkedIn  &  Artstation
Or have a look at my  Website