Al Shukubar

I made this project during my first demo reel term in Gnomon. It was a remade of two previously finished projects. My goal was to achieve realism as much as I possibly can. I wanted to challenge myself to make a series of 4 completely different environments altogether. The project was inspired by my love for ruins and remnants of what once was.

All assets are made from scratch, sculpted in Zbrush. Additionally, I made 4 tillable textures with Substance Designer. I created landscape material with layer blending and applied RVT (real-time virtual texture) to achieve a nice blend between rock assets and ground shader. I create a simple animated moving fog for that extra ambient mood. It is subtle, did not want it to overwhelm the structure. Utilizing world align to texture environment assets results in better quality in scaling without losing texture density.

Models: Maya, ZBrush
Textures: Substance Painter, Substance Designer and Unreal Engine Materials
Unreal Engine: Volumetric Fog and Real-Time Virtual Textures
Rendered in Unreal Engine 5.3

Responsible for all aspects

Breakdowns

Assets Breakdown | Structure

Modeled in Maya and further sculpted in ZBrush. I utilized trim sheet to achieve the texturing of the door arch texture. Pillars, bricks and ornate trims are sculpted in ZBrush and it is a modular kit. Shader showcase for stone and cliffs are the sand gravel ground that I made.

Assets Breakdown | Sculpts

Cliffs, small rocks and ground patch are the assets I wish to highlight. I utilized the surface noise to achieve to rugged look of a sandstone. Stretched, squished and twisted multiple cliff assets to form a new cliff inside Unreal Engine. It is how I was able to have different looks of the cliff. I also recycle the cliffs into another project.

Assets Breakdown | Custom Decals

I created two decals. I cleaned them up in Photoshop and created opacity map and specular map.

Assets Breakdown | Cliff Material

I created a Substance Designer cliff material and uses it’s normal with 2 different variations. One normal and one micro normal. Normal map will enhances any missing details that I could not sculpt and micro normal to enhance the noisy rock surface.

Assets Breakdown | Base Material

These were created in Substance Designer. Trims were modeled in Maya and was brought to ZBrush to further sculpt in details, finalized in Designer. I repeatedly use the sand gravel ground texture in landscape material with different tiling value and further edit the color tint to hide the repeated texture.

Assets Breakdown | Real-Time Virtual Texture

I use RVT to blend rocks and stones asset to the ground for seamless transition. Scattering small rocks further enhance the blending capacity between the assets.

Assets Breakdown | World Align + Real-Time Virtual Texture

I use world align to texture the rock if I have to scale them bigger than the rest of the assets by doing so I am able to keep the texture density. Here, I showcase that I am able to adjust the tiling of the texture as well as being able to control how intense my normals would be and with the use of RVT in conjunction with world align I can control how much of the ground shader would spill onto my asset, how sharp and the amount of falloff I want.