Lorenzo Segaletti - Feeling Nostalgic 2024

                     Quincy's House

I am proud to share my first Environment. I made this piece as a third, and last, year project of my academic career at AIV ( Accademia Italiana Videogiochi). It took me around five months to make it, the fact that I had to learn so much and to combine it as better as I could, with programs I never touched before, made it a tough journey. But the amount of skills, knowledge and satisfaction I accomplished during these months making this environment are priceless, and I am happy to share with you a little of the backstage.

The greatest joy I had creating this scene was realizing that Environment Art is my cup of tea. I am strongly fond of cinema, and as I like to say, I found in Environment Art the perfect meeting point between Video games and Cinema, my two biigest passions. Telling stories using images is pure magic and I put all my effort for doing it. 

Unreal Engine was the program I used for making the scene and as I said, I never touched it before, so I had the opportunity to lear the basics like: how to create complex Landscapes, the use of nodes for materials and vfxs (even using niagara), the mecanics of foliage and lights, the post process and the Sequencer.But for the idea od style I wanted to accomplish I needed to go further the basic. The first big obstacle ifact was the grass: for me it's a real protagonist so I wanted it to have personality. In my help came the beautidul tutorial of Victoria Zavhorodnia, thanks to it infact I was able to create the effect of the wind making waves on the fiel, and the grass taking the color of the landscape thanks to RVT textures.

I am a lover of the Stylized. I think it allows you to express with simply the shapes, the mood you want to comunicate, and since there are no limits to the imagination and the styles that can be created, I consider it a wonderful way of expressing oneself. In fact, I tried to create soft and rounded shapes, to give the viewer a sense of calm and harmony, constantly using Zbrush for sculpting, Maya for retopos and UVs and Substance Painter for the textures.

                                        All made in modules

Another important step was to create coherent textures using Substance Pinter and Designer, this last one totally new to me. It was tough at the beginning and I feel that I could did it better on some material created using Designer, they were game changing when I used them with the vertex paint for the walls of the house, overall I am happy of the result. I opted for a very roughness materials for all the scene, contasting them with the metalness of the windows and the water, I think it works good.

A very important theaching during the make of Quincy's House is that I realized I could deal with it in different ways as I learned new skills. 

I would like to finish this little presentation with a tought I maturated during the making of this evironment.

For quite the entire process I setted my aim on making good shots for the scene, sometimes even adjusting some props for a particular shot composition. During a morning of work, I was fixing the tiling of my modules and I was astonished of what I saw, a detail.

Simply the light passing trough the leavs of a tree and projecting the shadows on the wall.

A simple, but yet so powerful detail that the actual scene proposed to me. It wasn't intentional, but it was there. This teached me so much, and I changed my way of approaching to the renders, letting the scene guiding me choosing the best images for telling the story of my environment.

I really care about this shot, in my opinion one of the most meaningful for the story I wanted to tell and hope I reached this aim.

    Moonstar-The Puppet Show

After finishing Quincy's House I immediately started a new project, with the purpose of improving on sculpting, texturing, composing and balancing the colors. Sincerely I don't have much to say about it, it was a playground for studying new techniques, new ways on reaching the aim I want and improving on the things I said before, hope you like it!

This time, I tryed to make few buildings in block, but sculpted them all around so I could rotate them without having visible ripetitions

I spent a lot of time on making the cart, true protagonist of this scene, even testing with it some new programs: Marvelous Designer and 3dCoat. At the beginning I started texturing it on Substance Painter but I wanted to try 3DCoat after hearing that it was very good for handpainting. For the sculpt I used ZBrush and for retopo and UVs Maya

Had fun painting on photoshop all the posters and murales in the scene, I didn't paint in a while

                     You are all invited at the Puppet Show