Castle ruins Unreal environment

This is my environment entry for the rookies 2021. My primary tool used in this environment was houdini. I learned a lot about various workflows and methods including cloth simulation, advanced material blending  and modular asset creation.

This video showcases some of the techniques used to make this a more interesting piece. My favorite part of this project was learning how to use Houdini Vellum. I used it for the cloth on the unreal guy, and the flags.

One of the hardest parts was making the grass look right. At first I had a high intensity emisive setting on the material to give it a bright stylized look. This looked pretty good until the grass was in shadow, then it looked really bad! So I changed the style, brightened up my grass texture and did most of the colouring with an RVT to blend in nicely with my landscape.

I got so much feedback from the polycount website, it was great! You can learn so much from that website and people are always able to give you the hard truth and tell you what you can't see. Every project I do, i'll post there and see what people say. I basically  completely redid my lighting setup and changed from fully dynamic to a baked static lighting. I think I will explore this method more in the future as it looks really nice.

Thanks for checking out my project. Add me on artstation!

artstation.com/bradyjdesign