3D environment art and Material creation

Hello, I'm Ronan a student studying Game Art at the Hoogeschool voor de Kunsten Utrecht (HKU). I specialize in 3D modelling and Material art. I really enjoy learning and doing the work myself, so I don't use assets (except for maybe a character controller) and try to learn all the skills myself so when I present something it's truly made by me. I enjoy creating realism because of the amount of detail needed to replicate the real world is a fascinating design challenge for me.

This is Wave, a 3d environment art project I am currently still working on.

For my "Free Project" at my school I decided to dive into environment art. I normally focus on material art and simple modeling as most projects aren't long enough or focus on other things to really dive into the creation of realistic environments but with this project I got the opportunity to spend about 18 weeks focusing on creating the whole environment from start to finish.

To start I have to explain what I'm making. This building is part of a cyberpunk world where a city is built in a massive cave system. This is a somewhat old building in one of the tunnels where the player has to sneak into during a mission.

You can walk around the area and with use of simple UI the player can figure out that they have to avoid the lasers and find a broken window.

This project is made using Unreal Engine 5.3, Maya, Substance Designer, Miro as my creative vault, Zbrush and for the early renders I used Redshift.

Before I started working on the environment I first had to decide what kind of environment I even wanted to make. I did decide on a cyberpunk city in a cave but I had nothing more than that. So before all that I did research, into rock types, caves, underground architecture both fictional and non-fictional, vertical cities, mining, cyberpunk architecture and I looked for game references.

From here I dove into thinking about the game aspect, what type of game would this be. what's the story, what type of gameplay etc. I wrote persona's (poor, average, rich, not living in the cave city) to get a deeper understanding of why someone would or would not want to live here.

So I wrote down some world rules and wrote down a storyline in 20 steps. From here I chose 7 environments in the story and scored them to figure out the best one

I settled on the Old Friend Hideout.

I then wrote a mission around this hideout and started thumbnailing environments.

With every step I kept asking for feedback and which environment people preferred and why.
After my first round of 8 thumbnails I chose the best 3 and made a more detailed sketch to further explore those environments.
I wasn't happy with any one of the three, each had good and bad parts so I decided to take the best two, the 'office' and 'arch' and go back to thumbnailing trying to incorporate elements from both.

There I settled on the last one which was a building built in a tunnel which has a train track going through it.

I quickly added some extra sketches of other perspectives, then I went to 3d and made a quick scale model blockout.

From there I just started working and working on the blockout

Here I made a quick overview of how I wanted the player to move through my environment. And also did a quick lighting test in Unreal using materials I had previously made.

I also expanded my moodboards.

After this I started work on sculpting the cave. I had very minimal experience with sculpting before this so it was quite a learning process.

Besides sculpting I made a lot of changes and improvements to my material work. In unreal I have my own master material containing everything I need. But for these rocks I had to integrate a lot of new functions, like Vertex painting to mix materials, Z-up shading to add dust buildup on top of the rocks and general improvements to my master materials. But the end result is quite convincing in my opinion.

After this it was just sculpting the rest of the cave and just progressively improving the environment.

As mentioned in the beginning I'm still working on the project but it's nearing completion.

Next project I want to show something I've been testing out to improve my material work.

Some time ago I made a Brick material but I wanted to improve the way I showcase my materials. So I started experimenting with rendering a simple scene to accommodate the material in Unreal using the not quite integrated Nanite displacement in 5.3, next to conventional rendering using the PBR Render node in Substance Designer

Last I quickly want to showcase another school project, which looks more like product rendering.

In this project we had to design a game to help researchers from different fields but within the same company communicate with each other. To do that we thought of a sort of digital trading card game where every person has a unique potion assigned to them, which they can trade with others. This was meant as the very first step in communication just knowing or seeing another person.

But for this entry I'll just be focusing on the potions that I made. These were made in Maya, rendered using Redshift and as previously all materials were made in Substance Designer.

I had never worked with rendering liquid or glass with Redshift so before I could really focus on creating multiple potions I had to find a bit of a material setup that worked.
At first I wanted to create potions with a blank background to focus on the potions, and experimented with different backgrounds like simple white or transparent. None of it felt good though, so I decided to instead make a small library set in which the potions can exist.

With each iterations I changed and or added new things, but after this last version I felt like I was ready to create different potions.

So here's all of them in a row!

About halfway through I made some further improvements notably to the pen in the background, but the project had to be finished so I did not have time to re-render the previous potions.