My Environment Collection

Hey everyone! This is my entry with some of my environment works realized in 2023-24. 
With every new work I learn new stuff and try to push my skills always further. I have been getting better at working with modular workflows and kits, making trim sheets and tiling textures, and most of all, getting everything together in an engine like Unreal 5, where I can work that shader magic and top it with some cool effects. Hope you enjoy reading through my entry! 

Mountain Village

After a few rounds making environments I decided to work on a bigger project to challenge myself in creating an environment from scratch, that's when I created the Mountain Village project. Based on the wonderful concept of 腾飞Finger .
With some shader magic I could change colors easily and have some fun, that allowed me to make an autumn scene aswell, with very warm and cozy vibes.

Looking at the concept, I saw how I could work with a lot of modular assets, using trim/tileable textures and building cool shaders in Unreal.
This way I created a kit for all the buildings, where I was able to just swap between models and work pretty fast, combining them together to have the final constructions.
I also worked with just a few master materials in Unreal and a lot of different instances. By changing values I could decide on the different looks and create a version for every building, changing color, noise, gradients, moss, and other different values.
In this videos I showcased some of the fun shaders functionalities.
I had the wonderful opportunity to write all about it in an article for 80lvl, so feel free to read up on it! 

Medieval Laundromat

The Medieval Laundromat is an environment created for a past Artstation challenge, based on the super fun concept of Delphin Casado. I decided to challenge myself with working on a time limit and creating a very cute, warm and cozy scene.

I sculpted and textured the single props and tried to achieve a nice consistent stylized style.
For the interior parts of the house, floors, walls, beams.. I made tiling and trim textures.
The swirl for the washing machine was a nice detail that I realized by painting a sprite image and creating a particle in Unreal. I also wrote down a more detailed process in this article.

Ghent Dystopia

After making more colorful environments, I decided to work on a personal project with a different mood and style. I have been living in Belgium for a few years and I thought it would be fun to work on a project inspired by a Belgian city like the concept from Max Bedulenko.
The goal for this project was to quickly build a scene with a specific mood and atmosphere different then what I am used to. I wanted to create a basic kit for making all the buildings and work with main shaders that could be used for multiple elements and different UV sets in Unreal to get the right materials. I was also excited about the possibility of giving it a personal twist with all the signs holding some of the stuff I like. 

Generally, I wanted this project to proceed quickly, as I didn’t have a lot of free time, so I always tried to go for the best solutions. I decided to work with different UV sets for most of my models.
This way I could use tiling base materials, and use the second uv set to add nice details, like sculpted edges or metal edges.
Also, the base tiling materials were built starting from Quixel Megascans textures to have a faster workflow, and adding layers of different details on top with noise textures, like dirt, scratches and discoloration.

The buildings were mainly composited out of a lot of simple props, splines, and covered by signs, metal parts and decals. So by mixing and layering all the models, I created the buildings. The hardest part was to make it look believable, and not just a lot of things thrown on a wall. I would create nice compositions, group them, and copy them around.
A better explanation on the process can be found in this article.

The concept had a lot of signs hanging around. So I took the chance to add some brands I know, and a lot of Belgian beer signs. I textured the planes for the signs in Substance 3D Painter adding dirt and rust, while for the metal frames, I used the metal master material I had. For the led signs I created a shader where I could add different types of glitch noise and panning and create instances based on which one I wanted.

Fractured Horizon

Finally, my work for the group project where we created the game Fractured Horizon.
As Art director I was responsible of keeping the style consistent, as well as concepting and blocking out meshes in the preproduction phase. In addition, I was in charge of vegetation, trim/tiling textures, and design and create specific environments like the temple areas.

The most interesting part was figuring out and planning all the different workflows for realizing the environment , and seeing it coming together at the end. The goal was to have interesting compositions and nice stylized elements.

Textures

It was definitely fun to work a bit more with Designer and create this stylized textures. They were used as base for most of the elements of the game as we needed to have a very efficient workflow. We had this swirl element that I incorporated wherever I could and it helped to tie the textures together.

Vegetation

I worked on the vegetation of the game, incorporating the shape design and colors from the rest of the elements. The swirl pattern is repeated in the vegetation shapes and as decoration.

Environments

Since most areas of the game are open spaces, I focused on designing and decorating some key areas like shrines, temples..
The goal was to have nice compositions that would work with the narrative of the game, and create areas for the player to explore a bit more.