Of the Highest Order

The goal of this project was to create a sculpted 3d environment using skills I had learnt throughout my time at university and apply them on a platform I am unfamiliar with, in this case, Unreal Engine.

Each model had a base mesh created in AutoDesk Maya, was moved to Pixologic Zbrush for sculpting, returned to AutoDesk Maya for retopology if required and finally textured with either Algorithmic Substance Painter or Designer

This shot ended up being my favourite, so I will focus on this for my breakdown.

This was the first showing of the devastation that has happened in the environment so I wanted there to be a strong impact.

This wireframe is a little messy and hard to read. I am currently unsure how to get a nice looking wireframe out of unreal. I'll get back to you on that!

This is the Albedo layer. Not much to say here, other than that the objects all needed to be quite grungy, I used substance painter to bake and generate dirt masks for my objects. I found myself often returning to my reference to work out where the different elements would build-up such as dirt, mossy elements and water damage.

This is the lighting straight from unreal. It is a fairly simple setup and as you can see most of the light is from the torches. They are using simple point lights with a slightly warmer colour, I had to be careful not to take away from the directional light too much as it was a night shot and the moon was a very white light.

I noticed the directional light wasn't strong enough to create the highlights on the treetops that I was after so The only other lighting I did was adding an occasional spotlight on the top of the trees to add artificial highlights to the leaves.

Here is the final shot after adding a few particle effects and some simple colour grading in After Effects. 

Below is the final cut on YouTube, with all 5 shots included