Spring City

In graduate school for one of my classes, I created a complete environment scene in Unreal Engine based on a concept image. The concept's hand-painted, brush-stroked style and vibrant color palette heavily influenced my artistic choices. I began by blocking out the scene in Unreal Engine, then imported the blockout into Maya to model the scene’s assets. After refining the models, I used Substance Painter to hand-paint the textures, focusing on adding detail through highlights and shadows. To optimize resources, I reused some buildings with modified color palettes, ensuring visual cohesiveness while adding variety. Final details, such as unique brushstrokes and lettering, were applied using decals, which enhanced the scene's overall aesthetic and helped achieve the desired lighting effects. This project exemplified my ability to integrate 2D artistic influence into 3D environment creation.

Foliage:

One of the primary challenges I faced was creating lush, hand-painted foliage. I used billboards with opacity masks to form the tree bases, painting the opacity mask by hand in Photoshop to achieve a stylized leaf effect. I then created a custom shader in Unreal Engine to allow for hue shifts and other color controls. To ensure flexibility, I made a material instance that provided fine control over various foliage parameters. To add movement and vitality, I implemented the Simple Grass Wind effect, with adjustable parameters to control its intensity.

VFX:

To bring the scene to life, I utilized Unreal Engine 5's Niagara system to create styled wind and wind-blowing foliage effects. The wind lines were made from 3D models with a simple translucent shader, designed to glide along the components and simulate the appearance of wind blowing. I then integrated the effect into the Niagara system, allowing for variations in speed and size.