Hoang Nguyen-Environment Art

THE ABANDON TUNNEL

This environment was made in 10 weeks for my Texturing and Shading for Games 2 class taught by Javier Perez. The class focused on making all the tillable material inside Substance Designer. I have learned a lot from the class, not just making material in Designer only but also some very cool material workflow in Unreal.

For this project, I wanted to go for a very old looking tunnel that is abandoned. It has been overtaken by nature, so all the plants and vines started growing out, and there are several items that left behind by the people who once used it.

Progress 

I started with a very basic block out and assigned it with some first pass of the material I made in Substance Designer. Then I added some decal and vertex paint on the wall with an update to my material to make it looks old and dirty. I added in vines I made from Speedtree, and scattered them across the ceiling and corner to cover up the hard transition between walls. I also got some assets from Megascans and put it near the door, so it felt like there was people passing through here. The lighting is tricky since bounce light from Unreal is not very good, so I added in a couple point light to fake that bounce light.

Render Pass

Reference I gathered around for material and mood

Here are some of the main materials I made in Substance Designer and used for my environment.

Environment assets

THE GOLDEN PATH

This is a project I made for Digital Set class. The goal for the class was to focus on making a good composition and practicing set dressing skill. To make the progress faster and not worry spending too much time on modeling and texturing, I got some assets from Megascans. 

For this environment I wanted to recreate the Golden Forest in the game Ghost Of Tsushima. It is one of the location in the game where I had to pass through a lot, and I loved every single moment of it. This project went through a lot of iteration before I got to a spot where I felt like it is good enough.

To start, I used Gaea to create the landscape. My original idea was to have a big mountain shows in the background, but as I progress further I ended up not go with it anymore and only used it as a ground base for my environment.

After finding a good spot to start, I blocked out with basic shape inside Unreal to look for the scale. Then I got some assets from Megascans and filled up the environment slowly. There were parts that I did not really like about it so I made some changed before moving forward.

From here, I turned on Volumetric Fog to create some depth as I kept adding more and more tree to the scene. Later on, I was not really like how all the tree blending in together and I want to break it up, so I created another material for the leaves, and changed the color to yellow which turn out great. I was also adding in some plants and scattering falling leaves to blend the path with the environment so it looks more natural.

At this point, I'm still experimenting with different lighting, atmosphere and camera angle for the final shot. A lot of back and forth during this process.

I stuck with the first shot for a while, but then I felt like the scene was very bright which is distracting the eyes from where I want people to look when they first look at the scene. The focus was the middle path way leading up to the hill, so I added a couple more trees to block out the light and made the sun light pointing to the middle to create some highlight on the stair.

Converting mesh into nanite inside Unreal, I can kept adding more and more foliage inside my scene without the worry of making my scene slowing down.

Render Pass

Reference images for the environment

Environment assets 

Thank you for spending some time and checking out my Rookies submission.