Abandoned Mine

Inspired by Rob Brunette's Abandoned Mine concept - https://www.artstation.com/artwork/r98zZ6

In this environment project, I wanted to demonstrate and perfect my ability to accurately represent exterior 3D environments in Unreal. This was one of my first experiences where the majority of the terrain and foliage used 3D scans for texturing, which added great detail to the environment yet required high fidelity custom textures to match quality. Thus, I made multiple passes over my custom props in Substance Designer and Painter, baking out normal maps to layer with detail normals. Besides texture quality, I needed to learn how to create forest floor, hills, and erosion that were shaped convincingly. The terrain tool in Unreal was not enough to achieve this effect, and I needed to take multiple passes adjusting resolution and perfecting insert sculpts in Zbrush to help add realism. My foliage and foliage textures were procedurally generated in SpeedTree, a new program where I learned to adjust the parameters on my trees to help them fit my concept style and composition. Finding the right combination of twigs, stones, and foliage definitely was difficult, but I'm ultimately satisfied with the knowledge I gained as well as the resulting forest floor in the scene. My rocks were also procedurally generated in Houdini and sculpted further in ZBrush, for further normal map layering.

My prop selection in this scene offered some new challenges, mainly the sculpted wood on the mineshaft entrance and the plastic crates. I had never sculpted realistic wood planks previous to this environment, and I took many tries perfecting my sculpting technique in Zbrush to make the wood come across right. The high poly for my plastic crate could only be reduced so much for the low poly, and ultimately I had to practice baking out an alpha mask to save on resolution. Overall, I'm proud of the resulting wood planks and plastic crate: they were worth the struggle.

For the minecart, I wanted to practice using Zbrush to make the high poly and save time poly modeling in Maya. I made the basic subdividable pieces in Maya and never attached them to the low poly, instead opting to Dynamesh, cleanup, and add detail to the welded areas in Zbrush. While this was a slow process to begin learning, I feel much more confident in using Zbrush for hard surface high poly work, and will undoubtedly be using this technique in the future.

I would like to give special thanks to Matthew Dismuke of Raven Software for the consistent and in-depth feedback. He offered tons of suggestions and direction for how to make my scene pop, and introduced me to pretty much all the new workflows I mentioned above. All my peers and faculty at Champlain College get my thanks as well for their feedback and support throughout this project.