The Art of Szymon Wilczynski

The Search

This is my latest environment that I've spent the past couple of months working on, I wanted to make something smaller compared to my other projects to allow me to focus more on storytelling. I've learned a lot during this project as it often pushed me to step outside of my comfort zone. 

Link to Artstaion Project - https://www.artstation.com/artwork/xza6qY

Original Concept by Luis Peres

Lighting 

Most of the lighting is static with the exception of the candle lights and the Directional Light(Moonlight). The lighting was probably one the most fun aspects of this project as it gave me the opportunity to experiment with different methods and settings that I've not used before. This took a ton of iteration from the start to the very end, it got to a point that almost every time I opened the project I would change the lighting in one shape or form. 

Originally this scene was set in the daytime and that decision was mainly driven by the concept that this project was based on. However at one point I began playing around with candle lights and that created the idea of making this scene set during the night, this allowed me to create contrast between the focal point( the desk) and the globe area on the right side as the daylight wasn't providing enough light for globe area and faking it would make it look weird. Furthermore the candle lights offered me an opportunity to guide the player throughout the scene towards the door at the back which would likely be the player's destination in a game setting.

Whether it was a subtle change in light colour or the amount of skylight bouncing around the scene, the lighting was a critical focus of this scene that knew I had to get right. In the end I wish I would've played around with Global Illumination more and not fake the lighting as much, it took a lot of time to fake it with point lights, I could've saved a ton of time if I just figured out how to use GI properly in unreal (Definitively a mistake that I'm not going to repeat for future projects)

Asset breakdown 

Below you can see all of the assets that I used for this scene. For the wooden furniture assets I used a trimsheet which allowed to quickly create assets since I didn't have to worry about doing a high to low poly bake. Furthermore all the furniture assets that used the trimsheet belonged to one master material which offered me a way of adjusting the values such as roughness in a non-destructive manner as well as being significantly faster than having to change these values for every individual asset.

In Addition, I've created a 2nd version of the trimsheet which had slight damage. In UE4 I used vertex blending which allowed me to vertex paint between the plain and damaged version of the trimsheet which gave me lots of freedom of adding age to the wooden assets. On top of that I created a custom dirt mask in Substance Painter for each asset which also used vertex painting so that I could add grunge to the assets within the engine. This solution was a lot more efficient since I could change the amount of grunge in UE4 instead of doing it in Substance Painter for each individual asset.

*Note that the assets have extra edge loops for the vertex painting to work properly :)

Merlin's Cave

I started this as a submission for the Artstation challenge but I didn't get it done for the deadline as I just kept adding stuff and always wanted to push it further. Water and VFX come from the Soul Cave Environment from the UE4 Marketplace

Shoutout to Erik Nykvist for making the awesome concept!

Jungle Temple 

This Environment was done as part of an assignment in my 2nd year where we had to make an "above ground" scene, it's inspired by the Uncharted franchise which I've always been a fan of. I Had a lot of fun making this Environment as this was my first time dealing with foliage and it was one hell of an learning curve to get it to look and feel right.

VFX used for this scene were from the Soul Cave Environment from the UE4 Marketplace

WA 2000 Sniper Rifle

I made this weapon for a Uni project where we had to create a weapon from the Call of Duty Modern warfare franchise. The tri count is 30,500. Texturing was mainly done in Substance Painter with both textures being 2k resolution.

All the images below are taken directly from UE4. 

The Turntable was done in Marmoset.

Low Poly Sombra's SMG

I've made this low poly Sombra SMG back in my 2nd year of uni as part of an assignment which required us to make an Overwatch weapon for a mobile game, as a result we could only use a maximum of 5k tris and 1 diffuse texture (1k).