Stefano Ambrosino - Environment Artist - Prop Artist - Generalist

The Forgotten Temple

This is my Mentorship project for the final term at Think Tank Online, in five months I worked on this environment to create a portfolio piece and showcase all I've learned at TTOnline. The idea at the start was simple, I wanted to challenge myself and create a big, realistic and nature rich environment. 

Crafting the elements - Breakdown

The layout of the scene changed many times, this project really helped me develop my eye and under the guide of my mentor Gianluca Pizzaia I did my best to find a balance between the concept and my view of the scene, arranging all the elements in a plausible and interesting way, to tell a story with water, stone and some flames.

Water

The first challenge and one of the key aspects in making the whole environment work were the waterfalls, I did all the VFX from scratch in Houdini, the first step was creating the geometry from which the waterfall would visually start and practically collide with. Then once the first tests were done, I've spent a lot of time iterating and tweaking the parameters of the sim to achieve a realistic and coherent look.

Stone

Three main principles guided me through the work on the temple's structure and the mountains from which it is carved out:

-Making a modular kit for the temple architecture was key to ensure an efficient way of working and the possibility to iterate faster on the layout. -

-Reference from real life architecture was just as important, especially for the patterns and decoration engraved in the stone. Some elements are shown below.

-Complexity, in both shader and models meant working in "layers", adding detail to the sculpt, mixing one shader on top of another and constatly seek the balance between too much and too little. 

The stone needed to be as alive as the water flowing in through the waterfalls.

Some examples of the kit are shown below.

Compositing

Compositing was a huge part of this project, to have control over the the different elements and also reduce render times (One workstation was sadly sacrificed and replaced during the course of the project) the waterfalls and atmospheric effects were split into separate render layers and comped back togheter with the rest of the scene. All the work done in Nuke was key to make the final steps towards a photorealistic look.

Olivetti Lettera 32

This is the Olivetti Lettera 32 Hero Prop I've made for my Advanced Term at Think Tank Training Online, the focus was on replicating the details of a real prop, starting from real life reference of an object I was lucky enough to have on hand. This whole project came to life after I discussed some ideas with my supervisor at the time which suggested to make a scene to show the prop. The culmination of all this work is the short reel I've put togheter trying to insert my prop in a noir/detective story environment. 

The modeling was a huge part of this project because the real object has a lot of mechanical parts that needed to be precisely recreated.

The texturing phase was the most fun, a lot of small details needed to be transposed to give justice to real object. The final result is an ensemble of different tecniques, I've made almost all the maps from scratch and used projections with the reference photos I took as source to replicate some specific details. For exemple the bump for the green metal parts is made with a tileable texture made starting from a photo closeup I took.