Joseph Bardolph - The Rookies 2024

Lonely Working Regions

This project was made in the context of my honours year at university, and is the culmination of a year of full-time work. All assets were made by myself, aside from the skybox (Poly Haven).

This project is an immersive, first person open-world environment, heavily based on the real-life location of the Vercors region. The Vercors is a geological formation in France, it's a place I love from the bottom of my heart and where my family would go hiking in every free weekend we had.

The objective through this project was to investigate pipelines for creating realistic large worlds, using procedural methods working in-engine at runtime for maximum iterability and artistic control.
This project also investigates non-traditional LODing methods like UE5's Nanite, in an effort to explore its effectiveness at rendering high-fidelity dense meshes, and performance cost for dense foliage scenes, where 2D fallback planes would traditionally be used. 

The final playable map is 16km2, and also relies heavily on my own reference photography and photogrammetry data, captured on location.

Gameplay Video

A build is available to download on my itch.io page:

https://jemappellepelle.itch.io/lonelyworkingregions

Image Renders, Taken in Engine

Fast-Travel Map

Project Process

Landscape Layer Distribution Breakdown

All landscape layers were tweaked via parameters controlling distribution. As nothing was baked-in, this provided fine control over all aspects of procedural generation.

Landscape Tileables - Substance Sampler

Cliff Sculpts

Tree Construction Process

Gathering photographical data in the Vercors.

From photography, a leaf atlas is constructed and normal maps are extracted with Substance Sampler. The translucency map is hand-drawn in Krita.

From there, several branches are assembled.

According to references selected from google street view, branches are manually placed across a hand-modelled trunk.
Trees were assembled manually as I didn't have proper access to SpeedTree.

Tree Showcase

Tree Tileables - Substance Designer & Sampler

Rocks

Rocks are extracted from photogrammetry data.

Rock outcrops are placed procedurally according to a Brownian noise, scattering small, medium and large rocks, as well as small pine trees in the centre of the formations.

Similar processes are used to generate the other biomes, like the beech/pine distribution which went through many iterations.

Small Foliage Objects

Foliage atlases are assembled from photography, and PBR maps are done in Substance Sampler. Foliage objects are then hand-modelled from the texture data.

Chimeromorph

Game-ready alien creature inspired by the Xenomorph from Alien, the Yiahru-KaH from the Wake comics, and Gotou from Parasite.

UE5 Renders

Original Concept

High-Poly Sculpt

Retopology

High poly on the left, low poly on the right.

UV Maps

Baking

Low-poly without any baked maps on the left, and with baked maps on the right.

Detail View of the Materials - Substance Painter

Floodgate Evacuation System 002

This project is an outdoors environment in UE5, and was an opportunity for me to explore a variety of environment art workflows, like tileables, decals, trimsheets and modular kits. 

Project Process

Modular Kits

Tileables - Substance Designer

Trimsheet Process

Graffiti Decals

Compression Ratio

Compression ratio is a short proof of concept for a surreal, backrooms-esque walking simulator.

The point of this project was to explore workflows and techniques involving creating game assets from photography, similar to photogrammetry but for low-poly objects, by manually extracting geometry from photos.

This project also was an opportunity for me to explore all aspects of the pipeline for an immersive atmosphere-focused game, from audio implementation to post process materials, to camera shake movements to lighting and environment creation.

The full playthrough is about 5 minutes, best experienced with headphones.

A playable build is also available on my itch.io page:

https://jemappellepelle.itch.io/compression-ratio

In-Game Screenshots

Halogen Lamp Hero Asset

Halogen Lamp with Materials done in Substance Painter

Tileables

Mix of Substance Designer and Substance Sampler with my own photography.

Small Props Showcase

Props are assembled by extracting geometry from my own photography work, processed through Substance Sampler.

Large Props Showcase

The same process is used for large props.

And that's it, thanks for reading through !