EXODUS LABS - Realtime Environment

EXODUS LABS

 - Unreal Engine 5 Realtime Environment

We were tasked to make a modular, real-time sci-fi environment for school. Having never made a environment / worked in Unreal Engine 5, I got to work and started learning the beauty's of this program, which lead me to fall in love with environment art.

Working in Unreal Engine for the first time was an unique experience, it felt so different to see the props and materials you made "come alive" in the engine, it was really exciting and motivated me to put in a lot of work.

I decided to make 1 corridor and 2 rooms, the idea was that this environment is a spaceship that handles a bright orange liquid that gets extracted from crystals, this liquid would be used to power the ship and to brought back to earth to find a new way to extract power.

 The corridor

this was actually the core of the environment. As i designed a modular kit for the corridor which I could then use to make the rest of the environment.

I decided to make a lot of pieces that could later be used in my main room and side room. Together with a very well put together master material I made sure that I had a lot of flexibility, that allowed me to really quickly iterate on my modular kit, but not make it too repetitive. I also unwrapped all my props on a normal trimsheet, that gave me the extra detail I wanted in my scene.

I used RGB masked textures on my Master Material, which I made in Substance Designer

And I used a edge mask I created in Substance Painter, to vertex paint on extra edgwear to break repetition

As you can see I used a flowmap to animate the liquid in the tanks, this gave me the look I wanted with not too much effort.

I created a few other materials to fill up the scene, some rubber, glass etc...

The screen displays were done with just a flickering effect on a design I made in Photoshop

Renders

Some extra renders of my corridor. I spent more time rendering out this corridor than my other rooms, since I had way more time to spend refining this one, and it looks way more refined.

Detail + WIP Shots

Beauty -> Detail Lighting -> Lighting Only

This is how I created my first ever environment, Thanks for reading!

Concepts