COZY ALLEY
Concept by Julia Gorokhova
This piece was done as part of my free class at Gnomon in Jon Arellano's Environment for Games class. Interior environments have been my comfort zone for the longest time and I decided to break that trend for once by creating an exterior piece in Unreal. The original concept was a ethnofuturism piece by Julia Gorokhova on Artstation. This class helped me gain a lot of insight into how environment creation is done in actual industrial pipelines and I learned a few new techniques to help me create works in the future, including my first use of trim sheets for the floor, if you can believe it. One other thing I learned in Jon's class was how to optimize space by minimizing the use of high resolution textures and utilizing tiling textures together with texel density control in order to get as much detail with the minimal amount of resources.
FLYBY
BREAKDOWN
Kits and props
Unlike older pieces I've done, this scene has a lot of modularity and thus kit pieces were essential for its construction. Some of the kit pieces were reused for other parts of environment such as the building in the background being constructed out of the metal boxes on the upper level right above the door. The foliage and a couple of the props(the soccer ball and shipping crate) used in this scene were integrated in Unreal through Bridge.
Kits
Props
RGB Masks
One of the new techniques I've learned in Jon's class is the use of RGB masks in Painter to create on the fly changes to materials by layering different types of materials to different color channels. I was initially going to use this technique on the door hero prop, but unfortunately due to the number of materials on the door, my attempts at utilizing this method caused Unreal to crash due to it not being able to handle so many textures at once. As shown in the Material Graph at the bottom, each of the different masks for dirt or rust and whatnot are mapped in the RGB channels of the mask textures. Then each Material Function is assigned to one of the three channels above the base material in order to create a modular material that can be iterated on quickly.
RGB Masks in-game
Multi-layered material setup
Vertex Painting
While not a new technique for me per se, I've never really used vertex painting much prior and I usually have material layering done solely in Painter. To be fair, vertex painting can get a bit finnicky in Unreal and I had to increase the subdivisions of the floor in order to accommodate even the bare minimum amount of painting resolution. For the moss patches in this environment, those closer to the camera actually were mesh skirts made in ZBrush and decimated with a moss texture and alpha added to the decimated mesh. The moss patches further from the camera are vertex painted with the height map of the floor's trim sheet being used as a guide.
Vertex Painting In-game
Trim Sheet for Floor
