Potion Shop

A project that I've been working on for the past nine weeks is the environment creation for a Potion Shop. It is designed for modularity. I wanted to create an environment that gave feelings of magic and warmth. Overall the mood I wanted to create was more lighthearted but also I wanted to create a place that someone would like to be in. The shop itself is quite small, but full of things, it gives a sense of a humble little shop that is taking things one day at a time. 

So to begin creating this environment first I started planning. I gathered a lot of reference images from google and pinterest to inspire me and also keep me within a certain direction. I knew that for my project I wanted my work to be stylized rather than hyper-realistic, so I made sure to be looking at artwork rather than real-world references. I also had reference just for the mood of the environment as well. I sketched an rough overhead view to get an idea of the layout of the shop, and then I moved into maya to start blocking out the shapes and getting size and proportion figured out. 

For this project, I had two hero assets, a magical Cauldron and a Cash Register. These are two things that  I definitely feel would be something a game player would interact with. I allowed these models in particular to be much higher in mesh poly count. The cash register in particular went through significant changes as I worked to improve the buttons into something more believable and refined.

The potion bottles were also an important aspect of the shop. I wanted for them to be a repeated object but I knew there would be a lot so I wanted some variation in both their shape and colors so that although they were reused, it wouldn't be so blatantly obvious that they were reused. 

As seen above, I also started to get some texturing started. Once I began texturing things, that never really stopped. I kept editing or creating new textures up until my last day of working on this project, so I did spend some time on those. For potion variation, I created material instances of many different colors of potions and by the end I had over 30 different colors, all of which are shown somewhere within the shop.

After I had gotten a lot of work done on the basic elements of my scene, I realized that the only narrative objects I had were my hero assets. I wanted to add more objects to make the environment feel more fleshed out and fully developed. 

An additional aspect of my scene was that I wanted to make believable and moving fire. I had never done this before and wanted to include the blueprint information and material information to help show my process of creating it. I used a flipbook in the material and also set it up so that the light from the fire flickered.
Later on I also added magical particles to come out of the magic wand, as well as some steam coming from the mixture in the cauldron. I also animated the wand and the ingredients above the cauldron to get them moving as well.

As a  student in school, I am actually an animation major but found a passion for environmental modeling and creation. I particularly like all the tools and freedom that unreal allows me. Still, I enjoy enhancing an environment by adding movement as it can draw a viewer's eye. Please check out the video below to see the result of this work! The images don't demonstrate it quite the same. 

The final thing I worked on for this project was the lighting. Although this was the last thing to begin, it was also an ongoing process that went through a lot of changes. I definitely utilized lighting to help with the stylization of my scene. I wanted things to be more saturated and use strong colors in all my lights. It took some time for me to build up and get to that point, but I once again turned to references of other examples of stylized lighting to help guide me in the right direction.

After I got all these elements to a point where I was happy with them, I put everything together. Below is the final result.