Operation Claymore

Lighting was inspired by none other than Bob Ross, and his paintings of winter, proving that cold can have warm colours. I chose a low sun position as in my mind snow is always quiet, just like a morning after a terrible night.

References for architecture, landscape, and colour palette, also for small assets you'd expect to see in that period and location. I ended up diving a bit heavier into purples and oranges, since those are my favourite sky colours, and they added vibrancy.

These are all of the unique and modular assets I've made for the scene. Everything made out of wood and/or rope is sampled from one 2k trim sheet. Exception being the red house planks, that was a tileable 2k texture.

The trim sheet covered everything from white wood trims on the house, planks and beams in the decking, to the boats, crates with bottles and even tree trunks. There was no metallic in it, so I used the channel to pack decal alphas to it.

I really like making bottles, so to rest my brain from all the trimming and tiling, I threw them into SP to give them some character and treated them to extra geo for a more interesting close up.

The map and cards were the only other uniquely textured assets in the scene. I was conscious of my original work being poorly optimised in terms of re-usability, so I tried to tile and trim and decal as much as I could before being too plain.

House modules. I decided to split the roof into 2 parts, so I could decide on the height of the building more easily, or add half height extensions if I wanted to expand the scene. White painted wood as well as the steps were sampled from the trim sheet.

TRIM ALL THE THINGS! All of the assets were made with the trim sheet, I'm definitely starting to go down a rabbit hole and quickly starting to make this my favourite thing

The four mixer materials I prepared for the scene. I wanted some consistency between the mud type and debris in the trampled snow and mud, as well as grass growth in shingles and mud.

Camo net material prepared in substance, I used a basic car net material from source as a base.

First scene block out in blender (part of the art test). The main learning here was that while I had something that made sense specially, it was not designed with a particular angle/composition in mind - also known as a problem.

First block outs and modularity tests in UE4. Checking scaling to TPS template.

One of the "beauty" shots provided for the art test. Very bland and plain, lighting was not a criteria, so I just wanted to show the textures and models as best as I could.

First attempts at re-framing and refocusing of the scene after I've been told I did not make the cut. And some progress shots of this particular angle. I have  ditched the default sky and cheap flat backdrops, fleshed out the scene with some more context, overall polish and iteration until I felt I could not push it any reasonably further  at my current level.