A Harmless Hobby

One can only imagine how surprised and devastated the famous lepidopterist, Dr. Ponterus, was when he found his office ransacked and his safe emptied. Someone had come for the extremely rare specimen he had been jealously keeping in his safe, since its discovery in a very far country a while ago. The lepidopterist could never have imagined that collecting butterflies would someday become more than just a harmless hobby.

This environment was my capstone project during the 4 months bootcamp with Vertex School. Being a big fan of Dishonored I had been wanting to create a personal environment inspired by it for a while, so this felt like the perfect opportunity to do it.

At the start of the project we had to find a concept that would be our main reference for our environment. I decided to go for Vasco's office in the Addermire Institute from Dishonored 2 and started blocking out something similar and giving it some very basic materials to start getting a feel of the scene very early on. 

Then the work on composition comes in quickly and with it, lighting and storytelling. At this point I knew I wanted to work on a ransacked office but it was a much more common office back then. Only weeks later one of my mentor asked what was up with the framed butterflies which I was planning on changing for paintings instead, but he suggested that I put even more butterflies in the scene in fact. And so the story changed entirely, the very next day I was replacing 'common assets' like the clock or audiograph with some butterfly collecting tools.

Thinking modular at a very early stage allowed me to go back and forth during the blockout phase and fairly easily move stuff around or expand/modify the overall space of the room. One of the great things about Arkane's artists is that they share a lot of their work so I had way more references than I needed to build my kit, both in terms of architerctural elements and smaller props to populate the space.

When I think of Dishonored one of the first things that come to my mind is their amazing work on materials, so I tried to give as much attention to those as possible.

The first one I worked on was a wood fiber material in Substance Designer with exposed parameters that would allow me to very easily get wood variations in terms of roughness, colour and noise and at the same time maintain a good unity between these materials. Below you have an example of 2 wood variations with this unique material and an example of this same wood fiber used for a more complex material that was the wooden floor.

I also created a bunch of other tileable materials I needed in Substance Designer, like the carpet fabric, wall tapestry and cushion pattern for example.

Substance Designer was also helpful for some decal work such as the glass debris, because I couldn't find everything I wanted using Megascans, even though it was still very useful as it allowed me not to waste too much time making things that are already available for free and of great quality. And it was a good excuse to get an introduction to Quixel as well.

My biggest challenge in this project was getting the glass materials right. I used the Advanced glass pack from Unreal Marketplace as a reference and ended up layering various noise textures for some opacity and roughness variations in the glass and adding some handmade detail alphas for dusty corners or broken edges for example. Using fresnels and playing with the refraction also helped a lot. It was a painful process but I definitely learned a lot trying to figure those out.