Final Year Environment Art Portfolio

The first piece is my final university project featuring a traversable Japanese alley. It is the largest environment I have ever created that taught me a lot about modular workflows, working with blueprints, and shader creation. Working on so many assets I also became much faster and more efficient, developing and maintaining my own pipeline that sped up project completion.

This project includes two different lighting scenarios. Slide to change from night to day!

To change between lighting sets, I used sub-levels in Unreal Engine. In the level setup, the main level contains all the main elements that never change (walls, streets, most of the props, etc). The sub levels contain all the lighting , post processing and meshes visible during a given time of day.

The change in time allowed me to pack a lot of environmental storytelling into the environment with restaurants opening and closing, and props changing throughout the day.

Building elements asset zoo

Props asset zoo. I relied a lot on reusing as many assets as possible.

Example prop breakdown - for some of the smaller props I experimented with working on sculpting the details and texturing in groups, which saved me time, helped maintain visual consistency and reduced the number of textures used (fewer draw calls!).

My main wall shader combines the base material with a colourful painterly noise that can be adjusted and tiled independently. On top of that, I implemented a Z up dirt. This shader allowed me to create a lot of different combinations out of a limited number of wall textures and break up the repetitions in the tiled textures of the base material.

As part of my project, I created a playable build of the environment. I added code in the level blueprint that loads sub-levels at the press of a key on the keyboard, so you can change between times of day while walking around the alley.

The second project in this entry is a smaller environment I created over approximately four weeks of the latest winter break. Inspired by my love of dinosaurs and bright colours, I came up with this playground scene. 

Prop breakdowns. For these renders, I came up with a method of displaying the wireframe by exporting an UV layout from a 3D modelling software and using it as a mask in the emissive slot of the props' material.

Initial concept sketch