Liam's Blog

Category: University Work

  • Maya/Unreal Experimentation

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    To get an understanding of how effective the environments will be, I need to compare the tools used by both Maya and Unreal to choose which one is the most effective for designing the environments as intended. First off are the sculpting tools built inside Maya used to create a simple 3D environment alongside a…

  • Project Planning

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    Before I get started with any production regarding the environment art pieces, I would need to plan out what kind of assets I will be making and how I will plan out the time spent on the overall project. For this reason, I have created an asset list of all of the things I will…

  • Project Going Forward

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    Now that the research is out of the way and new skills have been picked up from experimenting with Maya and Unreal, I will be hoping that going forward that if everything goes to fruition, I will be starting on the production fairly soon. I am also hoping to follow what is exactly on the…

  • Getting Started with Landscaping

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    I enabled the water plugin and restarted Unreal Engine to get this basic body of ocean and sculpted the general shape of the island as a start. For reference of scale, I placed a mannequin down to determine the size of the island and added indentations in the cliff to start detailing. All the textures…

  • Improving Blockout and Fixing the Airport Landscape

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    It was time for me to start improving the airport blockout from Semester 1 and add some detail into it. The first thing I needed to do was add some walls to the subway section. This included the station platforms and the corridors. The next step involves importing the blockout into Unreal. I applied an…

  • Modelling the Assets Part 1

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    It was time for me to get started making the assets for the airport environment. I have begun the process by starting with the ticket machine gate. I’ve followed the image clearly to try and replicate something like this. Like with the previous asset, I gathered a few reference images to aid in my design…

  • Substance Texturing

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    Beginning with the immigration desk, I’ve thought about adding some nice detailing to some of the textures, with this plastic diamond exterior as a start. I have applied some plastic and steel materials to the rest of the model to give it a nice appearance. To finish off the asset, I put glass over the…

  • Modelling the Assets Part 2

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    I wanted to model a door for the passengers to enter through. I planned to have two variations of this, one for the airport terminal and the other for the plane’s entry point. Making this was easy to accomplish. I only had to insert edge loops and mirror one side across. I had attempted CGI…

  • Improving Water Materials & Visual Style

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    I went back and improve the water materials in both outdoor environments to hide the clipping. I took inspiration from Cloward (2021), Smart Poly (2020) and the official Unreal documentation for water physics (Epic Games, Inc, 2023b). Starting with the tundra river, I changed the refraction and absorption to match the theming more. With the…

  • Foliage & Additional Landscaping

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    I’ve used the MASH network to create the grass blade (Art MZ, 2022). I did this due to not relying on any foliage asset packs and increasing originality of the project. By adding a random node, I was able to manipulate the position of the grass and get a clean result with some minor tweaking…