Jeremy Chern's Unreal Engine Environment - 2021
A series of renders of the environment I did while on 3dsense Media School Singapore's Game Art Course. Despite the rough 2020 year, I have managed to pick up skills taught by invaluable mentors, lecturers and friends, who have guided and supported me in each and every step of the way.
Fox Grocery Store - UE4 Environment
Leaves falling in the distances, rustling and swaying in the wind accompanied ever so slightly by the the soft subtle wind chimes sounding inside the unassuming wooden house in the middle of the woods; the fox owner stands quietly in the corner, waiting patiently to serve the next customer looking for supplies.
This 3 month long unreal engine environment project was a definitely a challenge for me - with the added difficulty of needing to learn on the job. The constant need to adapt to different problems under the ever overbearing weight of the time crunch meant that every mistake that I made is one that I had to make fast and learn from even faster. From the wood grains on the support beams of the house to the leafs in the pots out in the front, everything had to be done from ground up - model to texture to engine implementation. Each stumble along the way being a proverbial scar, a lesson that I will carry with me to the industry - that being said therefore, needless to say, I have had learnt lots from this project.
The exceptions set for me by the lecturers was to recreate the concept chosen and bring it to life in 3D as close as possible. The concept art has been graciously provided to me by Ming Ying from Artstation, and I have chosen said concept art because of it's rustic and soft vibes with a mix of metal and greenery.
For this project, I wanted to challenge myself to create a few plant atlases from scratch by taking local plants and incorporating them into the scene, and it just so happened that I also have a brother who studied horticulture, so I got him to list a few different plants that match the ones in the concept base of how common it is and the colour of the flowers. I also wanted to try my hand in recreating the different stylised nature of the decals and decor.
Beauty shot of the scene
concept art graciously provided to me by Ming Ying from Artstation.
A process view of my version of the 3d concept and the original 2d concept.
The different variations of scene Beauty shot > Ambient > Base colour > Roughness.
Small Break down of some of the development process
- Modelled from Maya which is then subsequently unwrapped and aligned based on the different texture techniques used (E.g trims) and then checked to match textile density between the different models.
- Textures are done either through sourcing textures from textures.com, given a normal map through a normal map generator then touched up in Photoshop or substance painter or going straight into substance painter and manipulating the textures from there then plastering the different stylised decals on the texture maps. Models that are done through trims would be done in such a way to layout the different parts on a plane to bake in Substance Painter for AO.
- Then exported through different groups to Unreal Engine 4 and laid out to match the concept. Which would lead to the baking of lights and the different camera and render settings.
During the development of the scene, texturing and modeling had to go hand in hand, so while I would be blocking the scene in the early stages, we were also tasked to simultaneously create tileables and learn the different ways of creating textures. Some difficulties I faced were matching the different colours to make it as close as the original concept as possible especially with the way lighting affects the colours and the different renders.
The different texturing process and methods used. For the project I used Unique, Tileable, Trims, Atlas and some combinations of those 4 to make a few texture sheets here and there.
The different variations of scene Beauty shot > Ambient > Base colour > Roughness.
Additional credits: Rocks, grass patches and trees are assets from Unreal engine market place - City Park Environment Collection
Comments (0)
This project doesn't have any comments yet.