Jungle Crash Site

The first work I was able to do on Unreal Engine, during Environment week of the master's program in Videogame Design at the BigRock school.

We each had to write a synopsis of an environment we wanted to make... and then pass it on to our deskmate. The challenge was to create a photorealistic environment that fully met the description we received using only the assets found on Quixel Megascan.

This was the synopsis I got:

"It is now 2058, five years earlier due to an EMP bomb detonated still not known by whom, disabled and brought down 99% of the earth's satellites and orbital centers.
These falling "stars" devastated many cities, and in these five years the remnants in the now not-so-inhabited places were dismantled. Many satellites that fell in inaccessible places were conquered in turn by nature, which quickly took what was taken from them.
In the mountains of Vietnam some explorers think they have found the remains of one of these now old orbital stations, or at least it seems that way.... Something doesn't add up, it doesn't seem to be just a satellite-in fact, it seems to have been hit by one. What is really strange, is the presence of a walkway leading to the now destroyed and mossy structure.
Perhaps they have found the point of origin of that fateful day."

The idea behind the environment I created was to play with light and shadow effects.

The focus of the composition is placed in an area of light, while the main viewpoint is in shadow, in a cave. The glare effect is mitigated thanks to the tree canopies of the surrounding jungle that help create a pattern of light rays that punctuate the scene.

After a quick block-out of the spaces, I moved on to build the cave structure using homogeneous assets selected from the same biome among those in Megascan.

The real challenge was to compose a spaceship using only realistic assets... after an evening of racking my brain my eye fell on an old metal wheel hub and the flying saucer practically composed itself! After that it was just a matter of finding the right pieces to "decontextualize" to assemble the individual parts.

At this point I moved on to deal with the vegetation. Having distributed the trees in such a way as to create an even coverage, I went on to make the lower layer of the shot's tropical vegetation. Here in addition to the references I relied on my personal botanical knowledge for the composition of the plants to be used, distributing them in homogeneous groups, attempting to replicate their behavior in nature.

For the finishing touches I distributed metal debris in the middle of the vegetation and put small groups of ground cover to go and fill in the too empty spaces.