Environment projects
This is a project made for my professional practices course. The goal was to make a single portfolio piece that would be indicative to the work we would like to do in the industry.
I wanted to focus on environments, so I partnered up with another person who wanted to focus on animating. Together we created a hybrid 2D/3D short.
My goal was that I didn't want this project to not only look good for the background of this short, but as a stand alone piece as well.
To do that, I decided to design everything to demonstrate my capabilities to execute ideas from ideation to the final product. I've done this before, but the challenge was to hone in on a lot of micro details. I wanted to establish the habit of a having a workflow that would work on the professional field. So I started the project off in Trello, gathering references and organizing from inspiration to what needs to be done for each prop.
This already gave me a sense of scale and laid out each objective I've had to meet before the deadline. A clearer picture was given and soon after gathering references I went off to concept.
Concepting was another challenge. I'm very comfortable with 2D art but that only came with people. Environment concepting I've done rarely in the past but I was going to push myself here.
This had to be different.
I looked at many references, particularly rooms that were circular from game environments and decided to mainly reference off of Dark Souls 3 Firelink Shrine. It provided me with a lot of information of how the architecture were laid out.
After about a week and a half of concepting. I sketched out the room, did a breakdown of all of the possible assets that need to be made and went straight to block out.
After the modular kit and primary assets were made, I went straight to texturing the tileables and my trim. I went with the trim sheet first because I'm going to try and make the proxy mesh through ZBrush instead of starting in designer. This was something I always wanted to try and see the applications through this workflow.
It's a little more tedious since I didn't have a slider to just give me a random noise or bevel on the edges but the degree of control as well was a wonderful thing to have.
After that, the rest were created through Designer.
The bricks were made by going through Jimmy Malachier's handpainted styled texturing. Breaking that down helped me out so much in creating my own textures and understanding the program as a whole. It is an invaluable resource!
Finally reaching the home stretch I slapped all of my work together and was able to have this process video to show the stages this environment went through.
Some final notes, I added some mesh painting to the floor to blend the sand pile mesh more with the actual floor. The fire FX was from watching 1MAFX Fire tutorial and the falling sand was through Prismatica Dev.
In summation, I think I've learned a lot. From project management and program efficiency, they definitely helped create a stronger environment.
