'CRYSTAL TEMPLE'
'CRYSTAL TEMPLE'
PROJECT 01 / BREAKDOWN
I really fell in love with the concept art called "Frozen Valley Ruins" by Lok Du. I loved the ambiance of the piece and the majesty and adventure like mood it portrays so I decided to make a piece around it.
I originally made the scene lighting reflect the concept art light composition but eventually experimented and got to the image on the right.
All of the assets with the exception of some fog cards (EasyFog by William Faucher) and the grass (Quixel) were done using various techniques that will be showcased below.
For references I was really inspired by the Iguazu Falls in Argentina. I really liked the scale of the waterfalls and thought it would provide good reference for scale, movement and atmosphere.
I also took a lot of inspiration from the God of War games since they nailed the epicenes mood I was trying to achieve in this piece. I tried breaking down their environments and trying to understand what makes something feel epic.
PROJECT 01 / ZOO
PROJECT 01 / MATERIALS
These are some of my most successful materials.
All of them where done using substance designer and rendered in Marmoset Toolbag.
I made these in Designer knowing that I would need a couple similar looking textures to blend and this program allowed me to make a graph that could easily do this by tweaking some parameters.
I knew from the start that scale and texel density were going to be a huge problem so I tackled it very early on and tried a bunch of different techniques. I needed a shader that would allow me to scale, rotate and move the rock assets without compromising detail.
Ultimately, I used Unreal's material layer system to blend a couple rock textures I made in Designer using both vertex painting and world noise. I also blended a moss texture using the slope angle node to keep that texture always on top of the rock.
PROJECT 01 / SCULPTURES
These are some of the most successful sculpts I made for this project using Zbrush, which I then made a low poly model to bake this information on to. Something to note is that the above shader let me superimpose the bake normal map on top of the tileable textures which led to a better quality in the models.
PROJECT 01 / TEXTURES
For this project I was still getting used to Substance Designer and wanted to explore the program deeper but I also wanted to keep practicing my Substance Painter skills so I experimented with different texturing workflows for the hero props.
I ended up texturing the stump only using Designer and Painter for the circular floor pattern.
The big background props since I knew they were not going to be super visible I ended up making some masks in Painter, packing them into an RGB pack map and then using them to overlay different materials to give it some texture variation.
PROJECT 01 / FOLIAGE
This was my first time making foliage from scratch and I learned a ton in doing so.
For the smaller plants I sculpted the petals in Zbrush and baked them down to a plane using Designer. I also textured the petals in Designer, but noticed that the Elephant Ear leaves where not looking good, so for those I ended up hand painting the texture in Painter and then combining both maps. This gave the plant a much more interesting and livelier look so I will continue to hand paint plants for future projects. I utilized this atlas to make some cards and ultimately put them together using Speed Tree.
For the trees I sculpted some leaves in Zbrush and then assembled a hi poly branch in Speed Tree. I then baked the branch with some smaller ones for variation into a plane in Designer. Textured and pack mapped this information and took it back to Speed Tree and made a procedural tree there. Using the randomization features of the program with some tweaks I was able to make a couple tree variations that I ended up using for the scene.
PROJECT 01 / VFX
The waterfalls for the scene were by far the hardest part of piece to art direct. I have only taken 1 VFX for Unreal class at Gnomon so I wasn't able to figure out how to make a particle system based water simulation for the scene. I ended up using a "VFX" approach to it by staking and blending multiple waterfall footages to get to the final result. This is a horrible workflow for optimization but I got the results I needed for the project.
For the waterfall footage I got some stock videos from Adobe Stock, shortened and looped them in After Effects. I then used a flipbook program to turn the frames into something I could use for Unreal's flipbook node. By adding some parameters I was able to make multiple cards and blend them into the scene.
I also used Niagara to make some of the rising smoke/water effects in the scene as well as some panning shaders for the god rays.
Getting the right timing and speed for all of these to make the scene feel the right scale was a huge endeavor but I am happy with the results especially considering how many new things I tackled for this project.
'OTHER PROJECTS'
