Bogaert Finn || Technical Environment Art 2024

About Me

Hey! Im Finn Bogaert, a 19y old student at Howest Digital Arts and Entertainment, where I study Game Graphic Production, in the Tech art minor. 
Every day I strive to improve and learn more about this industry I fell in love with when I started last year. Through hard work and dedication I'm happy to present my works from this year's Rookies awards.

Contents :

- Trainstation, a Stylized Environment

- Exodus Labs, a Sci-Fi Environment

- Oil Rig, a Procedural Asset

- Other projects, a few smaller projects

Trainstation

I came across Atnajoy's Train station concept art, which I instantly fell in love with. I personally had never done a stylized project before, but I was all up for the challenge. Honestly one of the most fun project's I've personally worked on, I made this over 1 month, in about 100 hours. 

Main shot - This was made to be as close to the concept as possible.

Seasonal Changes

This project being my first time experimenting with stylized art was really cool. It gave me the opportunity to learn different shader techniques in Unreal Engine 5. And because of this project I finally had the chance to learn Substance Designer.

Because of making very modular shaders and materials, I managed to transform the scene into 4 different seasons really easily, this made the project step up to the next level.

Breakdowns

Since I don't want to overflow this hand in, I'll keep the breakdowns rather short and more simple. If you're interested in reading a more in depth breakdown on this project, please refer to my 80.lv article.

WIP

Here's a video on the work in progress shots of the project, a lot of iterations were made to get the desired result, it definitely wasn't easy, but it for sure was fun.

Exodus Labs 

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

WIP

Here's a video with the Work In Progress shots of the project, as you can see I heavily iterated on the lighting throughout the whole process to find something that perfectly fits the scene, and I'm quite confident I managed to get it down right.

Procedural Oil Rig Generator

One of my subjects at school was based around Procedural Asset creation in Houdini. We were tasked to make a Procedural Asset of choice, that would be able to fit in a game called "Rustborn", which is a project we at Howest DAE are working on. The tool we made should fit in the aesthetic of Rustborn, which is a scrappy/rusty type civilization making use of what they can.

Oil Rig

After a lot of thinking I decided to go with a Procedural Oil Rig tool. I knew this was going to be really challenging, since its a "Grand" thing, and I never really made something in this scope. But I was definitely up for the challenge. My goal here was to create a fully functional tool that allows for fast iterations of different Oil Rigs. I also wanted to delve deeper into scene creation in Unreal Engine 5.

Night & Day

Probably my favourite shots from the whole project, a night and day render of the oil rig, set in a simple ocean scene. The goal of this assignment wasn't environment design, but since I never had the chance to play around with outdoor environments in Unreal I thought this would be the perfect opportunity to try and make something nice.

TOOL DEMO

Proceduralism

Of course as this was a Procedural Tool, I didn't work too much on the environment itself, and decided to focus on showcasing the tool itself.

When starting this project I realised that Oil Rigs come in different sizes, shapes and forms. So I kept that in mind while working on the project, that it should be able to make multiple different shapes, without too much effort. Here is a preview of just a few of the many possible combinations.

Parameters

I have a lot of different parameters set up to make these different shapes and forms of the oil rig. As you can see the flarestack placement can be changed, the base can chance from amount and size, the tower can change in height etc... I could keep going.

Here is a small video that showcases some of the parameters :

Techniques

As you can see in the videos the tool is built up from 3 cubes. I did this to make the iterating process really easy for the user, and after testing my peers seemed to like the idea, so I continued to make it more usable.

Breakdown

Again for this project I wrote a very in depth breakdown on my The Rookies portfolio page, if you're more interested to see the actual creation of the oil rig, and some in depth code snippets. Please check out my the rookies post about my oil rig.

Renders

Here's some more renders of the Oil Rig.

Smaller Projects

Those were my 3 biggest and best projects so far, since I only got into this recently, I don't have that big of a portfolio yet, but I am actively working to achieve this, I wanted to share some other smaller projects I did on route to learning and improving at art.

Ford GT40 MK2

Procedural Tools

I made a few tools for an inhouse project we have at DAE called RUSTBORN. This is part of the procedural courses at school, where we strive to make procedural tools, that are usable in Unreal Engine 5.

Procedural Spline Based Bridge

Beach Scatter

Beauty Video - 

Transition - 

Parameter showcase - 

Final words

Overall I am extremely happy to be involved in this 3D industry and I am extremely motivated to keep improving and doing better. I can't wait to learn all the new things this industry has to give. I want to thank everyone who has helped me reach to where I am so far, couldn't have done it without you guys!

I hope you all enjoyed looking at my work, and see you next year!