As I was thinking about a project to do for my demo reel, I knew I wanted it to be something big. I wanted to showcase everything I had learned at Gnomon. I had a broad idea of what I wanted to do. I couldn't find any concepts that caught my eye, so decided to come up with my own. I chose to go with a surreal fantasy theme, kind of like Alice and Wonderland. One building that automatically came to mind was Saint Basil's Cathedral in Moscow. Its architectural design looked psychedelic. That architectural style was a part of the Moscow Baroque movement. I started to break down shapes that were consistently used in Saint Basil's Cathedral and added my own designs to them.
I started creating my modular kit for the scene. I was strict with staying in Unreal's Grid and keeping proper textile density. Some of these pieces were quite massive, so I had to get creative with how to match the textile density. I kept a decent amount of vertex points on my meshes just in case I needed to vertex paint anything.
Some pieces were more complicated to make. Having a time limit of 10 weeks, I had to get the modular kit ready fairly quickly. I used Maya's Boolean feature to create all these cuts in minutes, then ran a clean up to get rid of all the n-gons that formed from the Boolean. I used this method for any cuts I had to make, and it saved me a lot of time. Another modeling method I used to get high polys out quickly was the Crease feature. I would crease the objects, then convert the smooth mesh preview into polygons, giving me a high poly in minutes. I managed to finish the modular kit for this environment in about 3 weeks.
As I was creating these pieces, I would consistently test them out in Maya, making sure everything fit properly.
I wanted the setting to be a castle up in the sky. I started to sculpt chunks of earth that I could use to build the terrain. After baking them down, I started building out my scene and started to look dev what colors would work with the castle. With Muscovite architecture, the color is the most recognizable feature. I broke down color ratios in Saint Basil's Cathedral. That building used about five colors; one color taking up 60% of the building, another 30%, another 5%, and 5% for the last two. This helped give the seemingly chaotic color structure.
This is the oldest WIP shot I had for this scene. I was getting to a point where I was happy with the colors. Many people were recognizing it as "those Russian churches." From there, I began designing the interior of the castle. I wanted this building to be a well kept public observatory. I looked at old Renaissance laboratories for inspiration. I had a lot of space to fill up in the interior, so I decided to put decorative statues in it.
I wanted the inside to be decorative and have a good amount of ornate detailing on the walls. I used Substance Designer to create the ornate detailing and all the tileable textures. I wanted to improve my skills using Designer, and found it to be very time-efficient for me. Since these statues were going to be massive, I decided to go higher on the poly count instead of using normal maps for the details. To save texture memory, I instanced a tileable gold material to texture the statues.
Using some simple material parameters, I was able to control textile density and optimize the amount of texture maps I used. For example, some of the wall pieces required a 4k map, another 2k map, and yet another 1k map. All of these would have the same texture on them, so instead of exporting out three different versions of one map, I exported one 2k map. Using a 4k map is quite expensive on the engine, and most games don't have anything above 2k. With the 2k map, I would either double or halve the tiling and would get proper textile density for the larger and smaller pieces. This was lighter on the engine as well, since it only had to compute one texture map set instead of three.
For the rest of the props, I generated the normal maps in substance painter instead of baking it down from a high poly. This also gave me the ability to go back and change the detailing on-the-spot, instead of going back and changing the high poly, then re-baking it.
I was able to create the buildings with 9 materials that were instanced and altered to look like different materials. Shaders are also useful for is VFX. Creating the waterfall effect for my environment took a bit of experimenting and research before I was happy with it. I started out with 2 planes intersecting each other. This mesh was the base for my effect. From there, I tapered the top so it looked more like a waterfall. I went into the UVs and created stretching in some parts to have an acceleration effect.
This obviously doesn't look like a waterfall, but with some shader magic, we'll have a nice effect. I assigned some vertex colors onto the edges in Maya to fade it out. Adding a depthfade along with Fresnel smooths everything out, making it look like a rounded shape. From there, I lerped some colors together to get a nice variation, and added particles for the foaming.
Adding to the surreal nature, I wanted to make some nice decals that would add more complexity to the environment. Looking at real life references, I had an idea of what I wanted to do. I decided to make some of the decals in Substance Designer, as it allows for more control. The first two flowers I made were fairly straightforward. The decal I'm most proud of is the swirly roses due to its complexity.
The final task for my environment was to fill the background with buildings. I used the same modular kit to build everything out.
After that last step, I was ready to call the environment finished! I managed to completed this environment in 10 weeks, which also gave me some time to work on new projects in my last demo reel.