CG Generalist | Character Designer
Project 3 - Game Environment
For this project, we were assigned groups to recreate an environment from a video game while making sure to use LODs. The final product would be a navigable scene within the engine of our choosing. I worked with team members Emmalie Hall, Kekoa Hopkins, Beatrice Wells, and Brooke Floyd to recreate an environment from Final Fantasy VII using Unreal Engine 4.
Modeling
We each started off by creating a bid sheet and deciding which models each of us would do. I ended up taking the cafeteria booth. After Emmalie was done creating the whitebox, I began to use it to scale my models from. I first started modeling the counter, lining up my reference image with a camera in order to make sure the model was the correct length. At first, I had modeled it the way I was used to, assuming it would be smoothed at the end. However, I was soon informed that they had to be done in hard mode to ensure a lower poly count and I ended up having to redo much of it. Once I had the final counter model done, I began to model the rest of my assets in the same scene so that I could ensure their scaling was accurate in relation to each other. At some point, I realized that the cafeteria had a lot more assets than it had initially seemed, and ended up having to ask Brooke and Kekoa to take some off my hands. In the end, I was still left with a large amount of models, but I worked long hours until I had finally modeled and UV unwrapped each of them.
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Upon creating a model, I would put them into our group's shared Google Drive so that Emmalie could begin set dressing the scene in Unreal. After I had finished all my models, I took over the set dressing. I had never used Unreal before this project, so I asked Beatrice to help walk me through it the first time, which was a huge help. Because many of Unreal's functions are similar to Maya's, it did not take long to get used to the engine and place all my models into the scene.
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Texturing
Once I had finished placing my models into the scene, the next step was to begin texturing. I noticed that the material for the black part of the counter and the shelves behind the counter were similar, so I decided to do those first. I used Substance Designer to create a wood material that I could use on each of them, watching various Youtube tutorials along the way as it was my first time using Substance Designer. I also made materials for other things, such as the countertop, overhead vents, and the menu. As I created textures, I would put them into Unreal to see how they looked and tweaked them accordingly. At first the wall came out too orange and the sign was a lighter brown than intended.
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I also textured a few models using 3D Coat if they were more simple such as the fryers, stoves, and refrigerators at the back of the kitchen.
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Before long, I had all my textures completed and input. Overall there were not too many complications during this process other than one instance where I had to redo connections of many of my materials as my maps did not submit to source control. Once we were all done with each of our textures, Emmalie was able to finalize the lighting.
Finished
Once everything was ready, Beatrice created the final build for the environment which can be walked around in and downloaded below.
