Rookies Entry 2024

Hi! I'm Annelies, a student at Digital Arts and Entertainment. Thank you for taking your time to check my most recent works.

The Attic

Right side: Reference of the movie 'Malevolent' from 2021

My goal with this two-week project in Unreal Engine 5.3 was to explore how lighting could change the atmosphere of an environment. I started by creating a shot from the movie 'Malevolent,' aiming to match the lighting in the reference as closely as possible. Based on this initial setup, I created eight different lighting setups without changing anything else in the scene.

These scenes each feature one change in lighting design. Respectively, the changes are in light color, increased ambient lighting resulting in less contrast, and a shift in the direction of the directional light (sunlight) from backlight to front light. Even if only one parameter changes, there is a noticeable change in mood, making these scenes less eerie.

After this, I experimented with natural and artificial lights. The setups included scenes starting with only artificial lights (the window is closed off), a night scene with mostly artificial light, and a combination of cold natural light with warm artificial light.

After adjusting lighting elements in my scene, I created my lighting from scratch again and mimic the lighting from the movie 'Coco' and integrate it into my environment.

Right side: Reference of the movie 'Coco' from 2017. 

I followed the same pipeline with the lighting of the movie 'White boy Rick'.

Right side: References from the movie 'White boy Rick' from 2018.

Driftwood scatterer

A tool created in Houdini for Unreal Engine 5, designed to procedurally generate shipwrecks along with surrounding driftwood and scattered debris along nearby coastlines. All assets and materials used are sourced from the ‘Rustborn project’ from Howest.

The shipwrecks are entirely procedurally placed and generated. The tool considers the landscape to determine the locations of the sea and beach areas. Users have the freedom to adjust parameters such as the density of spawned rocks and the amount of debris around shipwrecks and on beaches.

The Camera and the Screwdriver

Assets created in Maya and Blender. I started of creating a mid poly version of these assets. After created the low- and high poly mesh, I textured them using substance painter.

This concludes my entry! I hope you liked it. I'm looking forward to keep pushing my limits and creating more content in the future!

Annelies