The student room

Welcome to my entry for the Rookie Awards 2020. Thank you for taking the time to view my entry.

The student room:

This was one of the first environments I completed for this academic year (2019 - 2020), and it is one of my favourites. It was the first environment that pushed me out of my comfort zone and forced me to learn new software and tackle lighting an environment with mostly static lights.

Here is the Artstation Post: https://www.artstation.com/artwork/dO51V3 (Contains some more images.)

Lighting:

Lighting this environment was one of the most fun parts. Getting to use different colours and experimenting with different lighting setups.

The hardest part was definitely getting the blue bounce lighting on the left side of the window. I tried multiple point lights first with low intensity and greater indirect lighting values, However, due to so many lights in one area, the bakes were not pleasant. I later switched to 2 point lights with inverse-square law enabled. Doing this gave me the power of more accurately adjusting the falloff the light gives. Since I was faking the bounce lighting I needed to ensure that it was both subtle but covered a large area of the visible environment.

Originally the environment was going to be during the day with some lights on in the room. However, I quickly changed this since it was significantly harder to create a focal point using lighting for this environment.

From the beginning, I knew that lighting would play an extremely important role in the production of this environment. Previously I had mostly lit environments using dynamic lights and was always intimidated by lighting, but, working on this environment really allowed me to appreciate the subtle art of lighting.

One of the things I wish I had known when working on this originally is global illumination. If I had spent longer learning about how powerful global illumination is inside of UE4 I would have saved countless hours with faking bounce lighting in the corners and the darker areas of the environment.

Assets:

Creating the assets for this environment was another one of the fun parts. I had never added many storytelling elements to my previous environment before but it is definitely one of the most important aspects of any piece of art. It was refreshing to make assets with a story, adding post-it notes with hand-writing on, and A4 paper with writing on, and even pictures of myself and my friends to add more life to the room.

Asset Wireframes:

Below are wireframes for some of the assets.

Fabric:

One of the things I had found hardest about making environments is fabric. There are so many rules that you need to follow when sculpting fabric. What type of material is it? is it lose? tight? is it wet? dry? all of these things and more need to be taken into consideration when making fabric. This was a very difficult task until I discovered Marvellous Designer. This one piece of software changed my entire workflow of fabric creation. I still used Zbrush and some alpha brushes to add extra detail but 90% of the groundwork was done in Marvellous Designer. 

Asset Zoo: