BYZANTINE RUINS
This is a small seaside environment made in Unreal Engine 4 and built with modular assets.
It features a temple in byzantine architectural style and a cliff side "hanging" derelict monastery, as well as mediterranean type foliage.
With the exception of the sea and the sky that were UE4 assets, I have built all the other elements using references and photo sources, that I gathered from my hometown Thessaloniki, Greece and its surrounding areas, which had to offer both plenty of examples of Byzantine architecture and various types of trees and plants that could be found in such a setting.
With this setting I wanted to give a feel of a remote and abandoned location, where the temple would be the prominent landmark, overgrown with foliage and damaged just enough so that the form would still maintain its integrity.
The main challenge was to manage building it in a way that both the exterior and interior would be equally important and that would be able to exist and accessed seamlessly, as opposed to setting it up in a way that the interior would be a different level to be loaded. And so I built different modular assets of the exterior and interior that could nonetheless be combined with each other and come together. Also they were made in a way that upon duplication and rotation they could fit without without any excess or unnecessary geometry. The outer dome for example is made of one side that repeats every 45 degrees and the pieces of the front side make the others too with few extra meshes put in the place of some of the first for variation.
Temple exterior modular pieces and complimentary assets with texture atlas or unique textures.
Temple interior parts and example of the combination of exterior and interior parts in the dome.
A vase and its broken variation that uses the seamless column part from the previous texture example.
Temple exterior modular pieces and complimentary assets with texture atlas or unique textures.
For the assets the approach was threefold. First I made a few square tileable texture maps and built modular pieces with their uvs set up so they could use these maps seamlessly. The goal was to use UE4's vertex painting tool and hence be able to paint different textures on these meshes so that visual variation is achieved and to be able to use the same material on many different meshes at the same time.
Second, I made textures in a form of a texture atlas, where certain parts would be seamless in either the horizontal or vertical axis and I based the building of different assets on those ones. An example of this is the maps for the wooden parts.
And lastly, I built assets that use their own unique maps, but still tried to make the most out of them, by either using these meshes in different combinations to create assets, like the goat head sculpture fountain that uses the stone slabs seen on the photos on the side or the vases that use the marble column texture and with their uvs take advantage of the seamlesness of the column.
For the trees I made a few main variations and a couple of lower mesh resolution versions, not as LODs but as lighter versions to be used in places where the player would not actually access.
My approach while modeling here was to use square tileable textures for the barks that could cover a cylinder at player height. Then duplicate and merge this cylinder a couple of times so a bigger one would be created. This was used as the base for the tree barks and big branches. For the leaves I used alpha plane textures where all the parts could be mapped on triangle surfaces instead of rectangular ones. This way the leaves part would have half the polycount than it would normally get while still being able to maintain the illusion of volume. Other types of trees and the ground foliage were made like that too and the forests seen on the far background are actually photos of trees mapped on single triangles.
The rocks and ground are made in a way that they also use square tileable textures and are thus optimized for vertex painting variation.
Main meshes count an average of 700 tris. Level 01 meshes are around 70 tris. Level 02 are about 25 tris.
Generally with these types of maps especially the ground I try to maintain an even amount of detail throughout the square surface so repetition is as minimal as possible.
LOFT
This is a small apartment scene that I set up in Unreal Engine 4.
I used various references as well as texture material that I found online and that I manipulated to fit my needs for this scene.
My goal here was to be able to make different meshes that would be using the same sets of textures in order to get a variety of assets with fewer resources.
To achieve that I used some square tileable textures, mostly for the building itself, like the walls, floor and ceiling.
Apart from those, for other assets I used textures that would have part of them being seamless either vertically or horizontally and then other parts following a dedicated mapping approach. An example of that is the texture for the sofa, where the lower part is seamless horizontally and used for the large surfaces and then the sofa pillows and smaller pillows use the dedicated parts. The alpha channel is used to indicate the metallic and roughness values for the shader. A colour tinting option is used to apply different colours on meshes using this texture in material instances. Hence I got a sofa, an armchair, chairs and pillows out of the same texture.
Other assets follow the same pattern as shown in the images on the slider.
Sofa: about 2600 tris. Armchair: about 1600 tris. Chair: about 800 tris.
These ones actually were made by posing a proxy mesh for rigging and skinning from a character I made and then reducing the geometry and hardening the triangulated mesh so that this type of abstract, cubistic decoration got produced.
Sofa: about 2600 tris. Armchair: about 1600 tris. Chair: about 800 tris.
a flyby video presantation of the loft interior environment.