Feudal Japan Environment WIP (Feedback/Recommendation Discussion)

TAJack

Hey everybody,

I'm currently on the path to have 4 big portfolio pieces done by the end of the year, here's a WIP on the first of them started on the 8th of April.

The goal is to have a total 100% playable environment in Unreal, while having everything created from scratch by me (excluding foliage and some materials which will be used from Quixel). Each asset will be modular, which in turn will hopefully improve my game asset creation skill. Awesome lighting is absolutely one of the main goals for this project also, I'm using Ray-tracing in my 4.26 build (I've done a lighting test with a smaller scene found here https://www.artstation.com/artwork/oAeJ1q).

This 3D piece is heavily inspired by Ghosts of Tsushima and this amazing piece by Tarmo Juhola (https://www.artstation.com/artwork/nQQvL6).

To start, I quickly created some super low-poly assets for the greyboxing, this is the first step:

As time went on, I started to lean more towards the piece I'm actually basing my 3D environment off, added some foliage and edited the terrain to closer represent the end goal:

With the greybox in a state that I was happy with, I started tweaking the lighting and then I started on my modular assets, starting from the biggest to the smallest (as learnt from Tim Simpson's YT series on Polygon Academy). First pass of the assets will be high-poly but as I'm using the Maya > Zbrush > Substance > Maya workflow, the assets will be heavily optimised by the end of the project to closer represent current game development standards. 

With these 4 modular pieces made, I bought them into engine and placed them together to create this:

  

Next steps will be to finalise the corner piece of this modular pagoda set and take it into Z-Brush to add some much needed detail. I will update this blog as I progress. 

Please don't hesitate to add feedback in the comments, it would be much appreciated!