Viktor Pecsi - Environment Artist

Acropolis Virtual Tour

I was part of a team of 6 artists responsible for recreating the Acropolis to historical accuracy. The project was commissioned by Pearson Plc. for our 8 weeks long summer internship at Escape Studios.  

As a team we've achieved to build the whole Acropolis, consisting of:
- 6 buildings
- 1 landscape plus vista
- 5 different foliage assets
- 176 separate figures as part of statues or reliefs. 

Personal Contribution

Thanks to the amazing team we had, the project was a great success and has been used by Pearson Italy as a virtual tour on mobile VR applications.

The awesome artists I was working with:
- Wiktoria Skrobarczyk
- Thomas Djalloul
- Kyran Roe
- Michael Neocleous
- Lucas Williams

Sculptor's Courtyard

Sculptors' Courtyard was our lust studio project at Escape Studios. The team of 8 artists spent 12 weeks working on it, mostly remotely during the Covid-19 lockdown. We decided to create a bright and lush environment based around an art school in 19th century Spain. Our main architectural inspiration was Mondragon Palace in Ronda with its mixture of 14th century European and Moorish style. The main features are the statues, mosaic patterns and hanging clematis plants.

The project is running in Unreal Engine 4, a fully explorable first person experience and consists of:
- Architecture kit of 25 individual assets
- around 50 different props
- 7 individual statues using photogrammetry workflow
- 5 different foliage examples
- a vista overlooking a mountain view.

Personal Contribution

I was art director of the project responsible for visual development and art bible creation. Co-producer helping to set up and maintain our Trello board through the projec t and helping with asset list creation.  Environment artist and responsible for most photogrammtery.

The assets I've worked on are:
- All photo shooting on location for photogrammetry use
- Hero statue of Sunna (photogrammetry from V&A museum London)
- Roman bust (photogrammetry from British Museum, London)
- Greek bust (photogrammtery from British Museum, London)
- Level building kit design and most of the finished pieces
- Marble material creation (photgrammetry from British Museum)
- Wooden mallet
- Bread (photogrammtery at home)
- Plinth of the hero statue.

An image of most of the assets I've worked on:

Breakdowns

Sunna statue

The original statue is found in the V&A museum that I was able to visit days before the lock-down. It took 156 separate images to shoot and a fair bit of tweaking during the development process, as the lighting conditions were less than ideal. The images then were reconstructed in RealityCapture to around 8 million points and required only a day of clean-up work in Zbrush. Due to lighting information still baked into the texture, I've used Agisoft Deligther to tackle this problem, giving me a more even Base Colour map to use in Substance Painter. The in game mesh is around 15K polygons and using a 2K texture with detail normals.

This prop has taken me about 4 days from start to finish.

Roman Bust

The original is found in the British Museum and I've shot about 50 images of it. The photos were too noisy and not to few to capture the finest details, so after the images has been reconstructed I got only a mesh of 1.5 million points in Zbrush. To create a clean high poly that can be used for baking, I've spent 3 days recreating all the lost details. Because of the amount of sculpting required, the texture bake wasn't perfect either and I've decided to create a marble material in Substance Alchemist from my photos to match the original statue, then textured in Substance Painter. The final mesh is about 17K polygons and using a 1K texture set with PBR accurate values.

The bust has taken me around 5 days from start to finish due to the extra time needed for sculpting.

Thanks to all the amazing artist I was able to work with on this project.
- Hannah Clark
- Willow Sorour
- Urim Osmani
- Adrian Cluskey
- Shay Payne
- Josef Russell
- Sapphire Taylor

Liberation at Dawn

Liberation at Dawn was a VR escape room project at Escape studios. The project runs in UE4, using Oculus Rift S. 

The team of 12 artists were to create a Victorian themed experience, where the secret group of monster hunters have captured you as their next experiment and you have to escape through creative puzzles before it's too late.

Personal Contribution

As an environment and prop artist for the team I was responsible for:
- Wood beam structure of the first room
- Seating area for the surgical room
- Interactable human skull
- Carved sarcophagus
- Texturing of the stasis chamber/starting area
- Barrels
- Plague mask.

Breakdowns

Human skull

I've created the skull from anatomical drawings and photo reference. The asset started from scratch in Zbrush, I've sculpted the 6 million points high poly, then did the retopo work in Maya using Quad draw. All of the texturing was done in Substance Painter using built in materials, tools and photo overlays to add extra realism. The final in game mesh is 7K polygons and using a single 512px texture set.

Thanks for the team to be so easy to work with and constantly pushing for a better quality.
- Hannah Clark
- Kyran Roe
- Christopher Elliot
- Max Fitzgerald
- Josef Russell
- Shay Payne
- Urim Osmani
- Kevin Pearce
- Willow Sorour
- Luke Crouch
- Thomas Mouilleron