Faith Hamill ToTK Fanart

Tears of the Kingdom Recreation:

Prior to entering my final year of university, I wanted to complete a summer project to expand my portfolio and to progress my skills in Environment Art and Realtime VFX. I chose to recreate an environment from my favourite game of this year, "The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom", and remake one of the reward shrines you come across multiple times in the game. This was a great exercise to stretch both my environment modelling skills and to learn a lot about realtime VFX, which I became more interested in during this summer and ultimately decided to pursue. 

Even though this was an independent project outside of university hours, I still wanted to include thorough planning and research. After taking close to 100 references from my own game file and from various other places, such as walkthroughs on YouTube, I drew up a bird's eye view plan of the scene in Photoshop, taking into account scale and measurements - and the fact that my normal Scaleman who is around 180cm would be much bigger than Link's 157cm stature. 

One area I wanted to focus on with this project from an environment art perspective was my use of high poly models to bake with. I am always looking to become more familiar with ZBrush and found many assets in this project could be enhanced with some sculpting. 

For my presentation of the project, I also wanted to make the environment into a playable space, meaning I had to take collision and UI into consideration, as well as the Unreal template that I chose. As you can see from the video below, I managed to achieve a look and walkthrough similar to the actual game, although one way I could have pushed this even further would have been to replace the default Unreal mannequin with a free Link one that I am sure you can find online. 

A big area of the project centered around the VFX in the scene, creating an evenly divided workload between the two disciplines. This was an area in which I really grew and I also learnt a lot of techniques from this, such as distortion, utilisation of vertex colours (painted in Maya), and UV panning and erosion. Below you can see a few breakdown slides I made of the most prevalent areas in the project. 

I ended up making two separate projects on Artstation to showcase both the Environment Art and the Realtime VFX, and these can be found here: 

A look at the Environment Art: https://www.artstation.com/artwork/KedXBx

A look at the VFX in particular: https://www.artstation.com/artwork/WBnJgJ

If I were to evaluate this piece, then I definitely think I achieved the overall "vibe" that the game has, even going so far as to add a dirt mask for the third-person walkthrough as it is in the game. I think my attention to detail within all the little assets really helped - making sure to add little details like having the floating symbols around the shrine be actual copies of the in-game Zonai alphabet (instead of just squiggles) really helped add a level of polish to the piece. 

In terms of improvement, I think my sculpting will always be an area that I want to improve on, and I also want to apply things like optimisation constraints to the piece as well, to work on those game-making skills that will always be needed in industry. I am very proud of the VFX, especially as it was my first time doing many of these techniques, but would like to iterate on them in the future with an increased bank of knowledge. 

Thank you so much for reading!