The Mystery (L)Inc

"Follow Shaggy as he embarks on a dark adventure to find his missing friends"

Hey everyone this is my Mentorship Project at Think Tank Online, this was the culmination of 4 months of work with the help of my mentor Rishab Nanda, and my amazing friends in and out of Think Tank Online.

The story revolves around everyone in the Mystery Inc except Shaggy being abducted by a cult and Shaggy sets out to find them.

The audio used in the cinematic is 'Scooby-Doo Underscore' by andihow421 on YouTube.

Since I wasn't following a single concept image to base my project off of, I used the Scooby Doo movies, old surveillance vans, and general 80s Americana references to drive the scene.
The computers and the headphones are based on concepts by Aleksei Avduevskii and Pavel Postovoit and a combination of real-life references

Prop art was a big focus for me in this project, especially hard surface props so it was really fun to deep dive into modeling retro assets.

My biggest challenge was to find a style that suited the stylistic nature we often see with Scooby Doo media while also being grounded and realistic. TV series like Loki were a huge inspiration for how to handle realistic worlds with stylized asset designs.

I also studied real-life references of custom fan-made Mystery Machine vans to design the interior and materials I used in the scene.

A fun challenge that popped up halfway through my project was that a lot of my camera shots were not conveying that the setting was inside a van so I took van chassis as a reference and had exposed supports on the roof as well as exaggerated the curve on the roof.

For the van walls and the computer table, I used an RGB mask to drive the textures. Thanks to my amazing friend Cody Trenholm from Think Tank I was able to get  an RGB mask shader running which I found to be much better to work with than vertex painting. My main challenge with using the masks have been getting good resolution on them.

All the tileable textures were made with the help of Substance Sampler and the ceiling was a custom trim I made in Photoshop and Substance Painter.

My mentor also encouraged me to use Zbrush in some way or form for a prop in this project as I had not used it in any of my projects yet. I modeled a high poly mesh in Maya, exported it to Zbrush, and used Zbrush for making booleans, chipped edges, and cushions/padding. It was super insightful to use Zbrush in my workflow.

This was also the first time I've worked with Media textures within Unreal. It was a bit tricky for me to get it working and rendering but my amazing friends from Think Tank helped me out.

I made the screen textures in Photoshop by photobashing and painting over images. Huge thanks to my friend Utkarsh Kumar Singh for helping me animate the screens.

Thanks to @syxyf on Instagram for helping me make the icons of the gang on the screens as well as the stickers on the cabinets.

Thank you for reading thus far and I would love to know what you guys think of the project!

A huge thanks again to my mentor Rishab Nanda for guiding me through this project, and Lucas Ward, Cody Trenholm, and Sean Morris for spending hours with me troubleshooting, guiding, and encouraging me throughout this project.