Abandoned Hospital/Forest Ruins - Nathan Button

Project 01: Abandoned Hospital

This environment is based off a concept by Florian de Gesincourt, which is of the real Bellevue Hospital in New York. My personal goal for this project was to use modular pieces to create a large building with a sense of scale.

The key to having precise modular pieces is to match your 3D software's grid to the size of Unreal's grid, and having snapping enabled. I also ensured that every piece had a UV Shell that was divisible by 2, so tiling wouldn't be an issue. Vertex painting was also crucial here to hide the repetition of meshes, along with decals.

A lot of assets use the same stone material, so I used a lot of RGBA Masks to add custom dirt, roughness, edge highlights, etc. These are also great because you can fully customize them in engine to get the final look.

Project 02: Forest Ruins

This forest scene was created for the 10-week organic world building in UE5 course with Anthony Vaccaro. The goal for this environment was to create a lush overgrown forest inspired by the Pacific Northwest region, with some ruins that are being reclaimed by nature. 

The trees were created with Speed Tree, and the foliage was sculpted in Zbrush, textured in painter and assembled into meshes in Maya.

I also used Zbrush for the Rocks and some tileable materials. I found it was useful for making the stone brick wall since it gave me full control over each rock and the grout. I then pushed this sculpt further in Substance Designer by adding some finer noise details and did the rest of the texture maps.