AbandonedMall_Final
Abandoned Mall
Role: Environment Artist
Software: Autodesk Maya, Zbrush, Substance Painter, Photoshop, Unreal Engine
Some stills from an environment project I'm worked on in Spring 2019. In conceptualizing this project, I approached it with two goals in mind. The first goal being that I wanted the scene to have a desolate feel, much like The Last of Us; while the second goal was to have a tree be the centerpiece. The Last of Us is one of my all time favorite games, so I wanted this piece to emulate that a little. For this piece I created a modular model kit with 15+ models to speed up development.
All models and textures created using the following programs: Autodesk Maya, Zbrush, Substance Painter and Photoshop. Real-time rendering created using Unreal Engine 4.
Final Renders
Technical Breakdown - The First Weeks
As stated above, I approached this project with two goals in mind. The first goal being that I wanted the scene to have a desolate feel, while the second goal was to have a tree be the centerpiece. To accomplish both of those goals, I started gathering reference for what I wanted the scene to look like and designed a rough sketch to convey the idea.
After the sketch was finished I started blocking out the scene in Maya to get a sense of scale. Modular set assets were made to speed up the development of the environment. While trees are simple to make now with the advent of SpeedTree and other software of that nature, I wasn't able to achieve the exact look I wanted with the procedurally generated solutions on the market. This led me to design my own tree using a combination of Maya and Zbrush. I used Maya to block out the general shape to make sure it was closely aligned with the concept while sticking within the parameters of the overall bounds of the objects within the scene. From there I took the design into Zbrush to sculpt and Substance Painter for texturing and Lookdev. Throughout this process I looked at various photos and made documentation on the early parts of this process.
Technical Breakdown - Process
With the block-out and test implementation complete, it was time to move onto adding a first pass on the visuals of this piece, after all, you can't have an un-textured and unlit scene. To tackle this I decided to first figure out what type of people actually live in this space, as well as the story of the surrounding area. From there I was able to inform what type of lighting choices I would make in the scene. In relation to the story, and keeping in mind that the people who live in this space don't have access to electricity, the background element were illuminated by candle lights whereas the moon light would be the primary driver of foreground lights. From studying many films and games, the presence of Crepuscular ray, or god rays, really helps to add a sense of mood to the environment. Unreal Engine has a great documentation on how to create God Rays by using the Light Shaft feature found on directional lights, which I proceeded to implement into is the environment. Links for making Light Shaft in Unreal can be found here: https://docs.unrealengine.com/en-US/Engine/Rendering/LightingAndShadows/LightShafts/index.html
Once the light shafts were properly implemented, I turned to grudging up the scene and littering the space with assorted objects and graffiti to make it come alive. Various techniques such as Blend materials, Texture decals, and Parallax Occlusion map to achieve a large portion of the grudged look of this scene. Blend materials were primarily used to blend the tile and wall materials with a moss texture for the overgrown look, while decals were used to add graffiti and dirt to the walls.
Early Renders
