Mentorship Project (in progress)

Unreal 5 Render

For this project, I designed an environment to situate two concepts by Mads Chan: a shamanistic hut and a throne-like altar. I transitioned between them by way of a staircase, structuring props and elements within the concepts to bring the scene together. All the assets were built in Maya and assembled in Unreal. ZBrush was used for the skulls and rock sculpting, which were manually retopologized in Maya. The featured textures were built in Substance Designer. For speed, control, and versatility, the props were textured in multiple ways using different aspects of the Substance suite. The terrain makes use of Unreal’s capacity for layered landscape painting and world-aligned textures. Curvature masks were baked for larger elements such as the stairs and the rocks, so as to anchor the world-aligned textures to the assets and add needed detail. Transitions between landscape and asset were blended by way of vertex painting and decals. Particle effects were created with the assistance of my mentor Patrick Poage and through my own experimentation. Rather than rely on Unreal's wind physics, I built wind effects within my shaders to prevent mesh crashing.