My latest projects of the year

Hello everyone ! It's my second Rookies award entry, and there is my latests projects. I'm currently in 4th Year VFX Student at ARTFX Lille and I would like become an Environment Artist. Enjoy your reading !

Snow Mountains Landscape

My first project is a wide shot of a mountain range above the clouds. I wanted a contemplative landscape, with a drone effect. My objective of this project is to learn the key elements of a large shot and how to optimize my scene according to camera distance.

Breakdown : 

I used Gaea to create the basic shape of my mountains, which saved me a lot of time in the workflow, but above all to create my masks which I imported into Houdini to use for texturing, and also to modify my meshes if necessary when importing into Houdini.

Having a wide shot, I created different trees on Low resolution to optimize my environment. Being small in the image, I created five procedural trees on Speedtree, to keep this effect of variation in my shot.

Before I imported my mountains and trees to make the set dressing, I sculpted the details of my mountains in ZBrush. Then I created an instance tool for my trees to rotate, size and tilt them, and I used Gaea masks to modify the shape of my mountains and did the procedural texturing.

I duplicated my trees and converted them to VDB to add a snow layer.

I also created clouds on Houdini, with VOP volume. It was a big challenge, because it was the first time I'd had to do it, but also to try and get that noisy feel with little volume, being clouds very high up. Then, I added the fog to give the impression of huge mountains, with an atmosphere because we're in a wide shot.

I matte-painted a mountain range in the background using camera mapping to give my shot greater immensity. To finish with the grading, using the AOVs and cryptomatte created in export.

Lille 2050's

This project was created with Louis Cresson, where I handled the integration and tracking of the buildings and the finishing touches to our shot. We shot at Place François Mitterand, near Lille Europe station, where the aim was to replace and add buildings in a Live shot.

Breakdown :

I used Nuke to recreate the camera movement used during the shoot, in 3D, to reproduce the same camera movement, and added 3D buildings and ships to add dynamism to the shot.

Then I rotoscoped all my buildings in order to the Lille buildings in the foreground would be visible and hide the 3D buildings in the background.

Finally, I graded my 3D buildings and the plate to give the atmosphere I wanted, a polluted atmosphere of a futuristic city with an unpleasant landscape.

Apocalypse City

I wanted to create a post-apocalyptic city with Unreal 5.3. To accentuate this atmosphere, I chose a sunset to look like the rumbling ambiance on the manga "Attack on Titan", with the aim of learning Unreal, and concentrating on set dressing, lighting and post-processing.

Breakdown : 

I used assets from Kitbash for all the buildings, and assets present on the road, except vehicles which are from Sketchfab. For the vegetation, I learned Unreal's foliage for the grass and decals for the vegetation on the panels.

I used the Chameleon blueprint for the lighting, which gave me control over all the parameters like fog, volume or even atmosphere.

I finalized my image with the post-process, to accentuate this post-apocalyptic sunset atmosphere, and lightly retouch the grading of my image with Nuke.

Urbex House

My latest project is the reproduction of an abandoned house in Morbihan, France. I wanted an overcast atmosphere, with very diffused light, to accentuate the house's abandoned appearance, with the vegetation having reclaimed its rights.

Breakdown :

I modeled the house on Maya, and worked out the details according to the camera distance. I didn't model the back of the house, as it wasn't visible in my shot. After that, I unfolded the UVs manually to move on to texturing.

The house was textured on Mari. I already knew Substance, so I challenged myself by doing the texturing on software that I didn't know. The whole house was textured by hand, without any smart material.

On Speedtree, I created all the trees (around 80) and bushes procedurally. I have a fairly close plan, so I couldn't create just one type of tree. The vines on the house were created from a trunk, to which I added my house as a force of attraction that allowed the vines to stick to it.

In Houdini, I placed all my trees and bushes so that my scene looked like the real thing. I scattered my grass in places visible to the camera to optimize my scene. I added a little ground-level fog for the aesthetic effect that I wanted.

On Nuke, I used an overcast HDRI that I mapped so that it wouldn't follow my camera movement. Finally, I graded my entire scene with the various AOVs, before moving on to the final overall retouching of my shot.

Demoreel

Here's my demoreel with all my projects above, thank you for your support !