Little Fish Shop
Demo Reel Project
Based on concept art by Pavel Elagin.
For this project, I used Maya and ZBrush to model out my assets. I textured them using Substance Painter and Designer. I assembled and lit the scene in Unreal Engine, and added foliage from MegaScans.
See below for breakdowns!
Breakdown
01
This project was initially for my Environment for Games class taught by the wonderful Jon Arellano at Gnomon. This wasn't my first environment nor was it my first project in Unreal Engine, however this was the project that made me fall in love with creating 3D environments.
First I started out with this concept art by Pavel Elagin, it was so whimsical I couldn't pass up the opportunity to create this in 3D.
02
I started off by creating very rough assets which I used to block in the scene in Unreal. The models themselves were very messy, however I just wanted to get the scale and composition correct in Unreal before I went on to make more complicated assets.
03
Once the scene was blocked in, I began my low-poly modeling in Maya. I didn't use any particularly fancy techniques, I just made sure the topology was clean and I created UV maps along the way. After that, I took them into ZBrush to create high poly sculpts to add in extra details. Once I was happy with them, I added both the high poly and low poly into Marmoset to bake out textures.
04
Next I started texturing. I created a trim sheet in order to simplify the process of texturing the back walls and the large planter. Otherwise, the rest of the materials are tiling materials I made with Substance Designer.
05
I added foliage from Megascans in order to fill the scene out more, which helped bring it to life. After that, all that was left was lighting! In order to get the shadows from the original concept, I actually had to put random cubes in the sky to cast shadow onto my scene. Most of the lighting is driven by a single directional light, however the interior of the fish shop has a rectangle light because it was too dark.
06
I added a post-process volume on top to add a bit of tint, which helps bring the whole piece together. And with that, the fish shop is complete! I learned a lot of new techniques in all different types of programs over the 10 weeks it took to create this, and despite dealing with lots of doubts throughout the process this is still one of my favorite pieces.
