Tanja Berkus - Environment/Prop Art Portfolio

1. Hongkong Inspired Street

This was my first portfolio project after I finished the Game Art & 3D Animation course at SAE Institute. My goal was to deepen my understand of optimized environment creation workflows and also work with Unreal Engine 5 for the first time, since I only used UE4 before that. One of the biggest challenges was the sheer size of the scene, with the houses being multiple metres high and the street beeing filled with shops. I really had to look into different kind of workflows to make a flexible modular kit, while also keeping everything interesting and non-repetitive. For that I used trimsheets, tiling textures, RGB Masks, Mesh Decals and Detail Normals. This was a great learning experience for me and I really enjoyed the process.

Except the texture atlas for my foliage which is from Megascans, everything in this scene was created by me from scratch.

Down below you'll find the complete scene overview and a breakdown of the most important workflows I used.

Here is a small part of my reference board, with the images that shaped my initial vision for the scene. The entire reference board includes images for all the assets I had to create. While the images include a lot of modularity on first glance, there is a lot of detail and uniqueness to be found within. This made creating the scene a fun and challenging process.

Tiling textures were created using Substance Designer.

2. Abandoned Gothic Church

The Abandoned Gothic Church is my most recent environment project and while in its final stages, still a WIP that I plan on finishing in the coming week. I finished this final Screenshot and wanted to include the project, because it helped me deepen my skills in areas I didn't touch in my other projects. This included more In-depth sculpting in zBrush with things like ornaments and rocks. I also created a lof of foliage in Speedtree and used thing like Substance Sampler to create realistic texture from photos.

Almost everything in this scene was created by me again. The current exceptions are the bark textures from my trees and the texture atlases from the fern, clove rand blueberry shrub, which are from Megascans. The meshes and the other remaining foliage textures were created by me using Speedtree.

The Background Fog was made using EasyFog by William Faucher.

My first step was analysing my reference and identifiying repeating parts.

The gravestones and stonewall were created with a Low to Highpoly workflow. I created a base mesh in Max and added the Highpoly details in zBrush. I baked a Normal Map in Substance Painter where I also textured these props.

The foliage was completly created using Speedtree. The textures for the fir tree were completely done in Speedtree aswell using a gradient map for the needle color and making branches to convert into an atlas texture. The same was done for the beech tree, where I used images of leaves I took as a base texture.

My Master Material has similar functions as the one in my Hongkong project. RGB Masks were used again to create variation and I just reused the setup from my last project. Besides that I also included Runtime Virtual Textures again to blend me meshes into the landscape. The setup is also reused from the Hongkong project.

I also added the possibility to use a WAT so I can freely scale my rocks without the Texel Density getting low.

A big part of the project was creating a nice looking moss. To achieve this I used Normal Blending and Nanite Displacement to create a good moss distribution and fluffyness. With the Fuzzy Shading Node I made the Edges and inner parts of the moss a different color.

To get more depth on my landscape material, I used Parallax Occlusion Mapping in my landscape material.

I created different sculpts for the ornaments and rocks in zBrush. I usually started with a base mesh imported from 3DS Max and created the lowpoly based on my sculpt.

3. Nikon SP - Hero Prop

If you made it this far, thank you ! I hope you enjoyed my projects and that I was able to give a good insight into my process ! During the past year, I learned a lot about 3D and while it was challenging, I also had a lot of fun. I am excited for future projects and wish everyone participating in the awards best of luck!

Feel free to follow my Artstation too, if you're interested :)

https://www.artstation.com/tanjaberkus