Joan Tassov- 3D Environment/Prop work

A western story

During some of my free time which is not that much I decided to create a portfolio piece. I managed to complete it in 3 days while my main focus was learning Marvelous Designer for the cloth on which I spent the most time.

I drew a lot of inspiration from Rockstar's Red Dead Redeption 2 for this piece.

Another goal I had in mind for this project was to keep the carriage game-ready in terms of polycount.

The blockout stages I went trough while keeping in mind player-scale and silhouette.

The cloth simulation in Marvelous where I used "invisible blockers"(at least that's how I call them) which support the cloth to go inside as if they were wrapped around the wooden planks. I also used this method to pull the holes where the hooks would pull the cloth.

A western story...diorama?

This is the first big project I am doing entirely alone and it has been quite the jorney so far as I faced so many issues which I never even thought about. The diorama is a follow-up of the carriage I made previously as I figured out that a lot of jobs in the industry require that an environment artist should have at least one scene which is entirely done by him and on the other hand it was a plan to learn new skills which I was neglecting before.

The initial Idea was to combine what I liked of the bandit camps in Red Dead Redemption 2 and expand upon based on the story I had in my head.

It is very much WIP currently as I am occupied with my university work.

[#1] The initial blockout

[#2] Just had finalized the carriage and mvoed onto improving all the assets which require cloth

I had a lot of fun blocking out but at one point I was rushing to create and texture assets which is wrong as I still hadn't captured the feel.

I also had no idea of how to setup the lighting which led me to a lot of frustrations and I almost felt like starting a new project.

[#3]Using Quixel's foliage and Speed Tree for the first time was rather unsuccessful

[#4]I worked on the feedback I was given and I decided to create a new tree and start over with the terrain. I had also improved my terrain materials and used Megascans for it.

This is the current state of my personal project. Still plenty to do.

The last thing I spent time on was creating the Oak Tree branches utilizing Megascans atlases and creating 3D geometry which is ready for baking as I decided to bring the big tree to life and optimize it further.

Folded Cloth Retopo Tutorial

I believe this is by far my strongest contribution to the games industry as I figured out a pipeline which allows the artists to spend more time doing art instead of messing with the technical aspect of it.

I happened to encounter this problem while working on my diorama. My main goal there was to keep everything optimized and I couldn't do that for the cloth, especially when it was folded as it would take a lot of time to retopo manually.

Full post with GIF's can be found on my portfolio.

Deep End

DeepEnd is a fully optimized Unreal Tournament map group project on which I worked on Shaders, Rocks, Vegetation,  Assets and also made the trailer.

During the first half of the project I made most of the master materials and wrote an extensive PDF of the pipeline for them.

Small section of the set-dressing I did while trying to convey a story and make it interesting for the player without destroying the game flow.

The more technical aspect of this project can be found on my website as it includes a lot of GIF's.