UNDERHOME

For my fourth Demo Reel piece, I wanted to showcase my ability to create stylized work so as to better demonstrate my range as an artist. I went looking on Artstation for painterly, 2D concept art to work from, and found this beautiful digital painting by Donovan Valdes, titled "Underhome." I quickly fell in love with its whimsical, faerie-like allure and the exaggerated proportions of the structures.

"Underhome." Concept by Donovan Valdes

After setting up a rough blockout in Maya, I put together a lighting pass within Unreal to get an idea for the composition, including fog cards from William Faucher's EasyFog plugin. This helped me prioritize which assets would need the most attention in terms of sculpting and texturing, versus which elements would be more heavily hidden by fog. I cheated some God Rays using custom cards, with the plan to add dust FX later to help really sell them.

I then proceeded to take my meshes into Zbrush to sculpt them. I needed to create several rocky columns to form the spherical shape of the cave, as well as a number of rooty trunks to represent the overgrowth of fungus. The dock was made using a modular kit - just one post and five planks on a simgle UV sheet, to maximize texture resolution - while the boat in the foreground was treated as its own hero asset.

Without a doubt, the most time-consuming part of the sculpting phase was carving out the bricks in the faerie huts, as well as sculpting the mushroom cap roofs. Seeing as none of my meshes needed to be animated, I was able to heavily decimate them down in ZBrush to reduce their polycounts. I made sure to be thrifty with my UV sheets to keep the project lighter - all the components of my "hero hut", for instance, including the stonework, roof, door, stairs, and the fungal trunk, are laid out on one UV sheet.

As with my "Desert Fortress" demo reel piece, I utilized parameters and material instances within Unreal to allow me greater control over my textures and shaders in-engine, so that I could make tweaks to values and maps to better fit my specific lighting needs.

With my meshes and textures integrated into Unreal, it was time to finish the piece off with some effects and blueprints. Following some guides on Youtube, I put together some simple stylized grass with a Wind Offset loop applied to its vertices. I had already set up a Water Body Actor in Unreal to create the underground lake, so I made a Buoyancy Blueprint for the boat to make sure it would bob naturally on the water's surface. It took quite a bit of tweaking the various settings, including pontoon placement and drag to get the boat to a place where I was happy with it, but my determination paid off in the end. I also used Unreal's cable actors to create rope and vines that would swing in the breeze. Some custom cards using Cobweb Alphas from the Artstation Marketplace helped to simulate clumbs of moss and other hanging vegetation. Finally, I used Niagara dust particles to help exaggerate the sunbeams.

I'm very proud of the final result of my work, and I'm looking forward to potentially adding more stylized pieces to my reel in the future.