Urban Painterly Environment
Engine: Unreal Engine 5
Production Time: 4 Weeks
Concept Reference: “TomCat Brothers 2” by Piotr Jablonski
Link to Arstation: PainterlyUrbanEnvironment
Accomplishments and Techniques:
Created a game-ready 3D stylized environment in Unreal Engine 5
Utilized modern texturing techniques in a PBR workflow to create materials that dnyamically react to environmental lighting
Utilized procedural texturing in Adobe Substance Designer in order to create painterly materials with visible brushstokes
Modeled, unrwapped, and sculpted 3D assets in Blender
Project Overview:
This project was an opportunity for me to stretch my wings and attempt to create a stylized environment that still used realistic lighting effects in following the reference image. Each asset was modeled and sculpted in Blender, and although the models themselves were quite simple, matching the strange perspective from the concept art proved to be an intereseting challenge - each building had to be itereated on multiple times, warping their vertices to achieve a cartoonish look.
Painterly Material:
The vast majority of props in the scene use a procedural "hand-painted" material that I created in Substance Designer, loosely following this tutorial from Poly Doorway - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BiCGZJ3UZhI&t=10s. This allowed me to coat each surface in a base layer of paint strokes that could be customized using a master material inside of UE5, and I then simply layered a variety of decals over the scene in order to acheive greater variation in color and texture.
Decals:
Most of the decals were handpainted in Photoshop, accompanied by a small handful that I downloaded from textures.com. Every prop was modeled, sculpted, and unwrapped inside of Blender, before being exported to UE5. This was a great chance to try out Blender's sculpting capabilities, which, while not as in-depth as Zbrush, are a quick method for developing edgeware on harsh surfaces, such as the concrete walls and stairs.
I learned alot during the process of creating this environment, and am excited to put those discoveries to use for my next project!
