Rookies Entry 2024

Hi! I'm Cesanne, a student at Digital Arts and Entertainment. Here is some of my work that I made during my time here. As a full tech artist, it might not all be as visual as most other entries, but I hope you will still enjoy the read! :)

Mushroom Cavern (1/5)

Be transported into the magical land underneath the Earth's surface. Created with my own mushroom HDA, this piece holds a special place in my heart.

The original goal was to create a 180 degree environment created in about 2 weeks. Because of this short time frame and the amount of mushrooms I needed, I knew I wasn't going to model them all. For this reason, I created a simple HDA with which I was able to create a variety of mushrooms.

To give the mushrooms some more variety, they have also been vertex painted to blend between two textures. This also let them fit better into the environment.

The other assets came from Quixel's Megascans, while the adorable creature is from DotFlare on Sketchfab. Lighting and set placement are all done by me.

The Ice Dragon's Lair (2/5)

To the brave adventurer, be warned, a dragon has made the tower its lair. In this project, I played around with Niagara and Unreal to create some real-time visual effects.

I wanted to recreate the style of Ori and the Blind Forest as it looked so vibrant and adorable to me. Breaking down the RFX further into its building blocks, I started working on it.

P4 For Maya (3/5)

And here we get to a part that is a whole lot visually pleasing, but still a necessary part of game development and a big part of being a tech artist. Scripting!

For this project, I created a Python script for Maya that would connect Maya to Perforce. The tool is capable of the basics like connecting to the server, automatically checking out files, marking them for add and submitting, as well as some more advanced features like reverting files and checking Maya files for common problems before saving.

It also logs everything including warning and errors. The dockable UI is easy to use, yet out of the way while using Maya.

As for the more technical side, the Python code is easily extendable and adaptable using modules implementing a P4MayaModule abstract class. If added to the UI, it gets its own tab and is completely separated from the other modules of the tool.

Pyhä Luosto National Park (4/5)

Back to visuals we go! Assets were not the only thing I used Houdini for. I also dabbled into making an environment using both Houdini and Unreal Engine 5. This fully procedural landscape was created to look as if it could be part of Pyhä Luosto National Park in Finland.

While the assets came from Quixel's Megascans, everything else was completely procedurally placed and generated. Starting with the heightfield generation, the river tool dug its way down the mountains. After this was complete, biomes were generated. The bog biome was a little special as it had two very different types of vegetation within the biome and as such, there was a fourth HDA accounting for it. Finally, bigger assets were scattered on the terrain using a final HDA.

Realistic Ice Shader (5/5)

Completing this journey is a realistic ice shader for ice caves. Created for my graduation work. This ice shader was created using the new Substrate framework of Unreal Engine 5. It is meant to be useable in a real-time application.

As Substrate's layer system is still a little heavy, both in performance as well as in memory, it uses two parameter blended layers. This keeps some of the feel of the layered look of Substrate, while reducing memory and GPU footprint drastically. On top of that, I implemented a Volumetric Lighting Tool to create the illusion of subsurface scattering. This Volumetric Lighting Tool was created using Blueprints and Niagara systems. It comes with an Editor Utility Widget as well as Debug points and was heavily inspired by Ghislain Girardot's work on the topic. The shader then uses the volumetric render target the tool writes to to add extra emissive data to the shader.

And with that, this concludes my entry. I hope you enjoyed it and thank you so much for reading through it all!