[WIP] Industrial Nature project

mhuang97

I'm starting a new project with a theme of Industry vs Nature, situated in a city industrial apartment. The person feels suffocated by industrialism and is trying to reclaim a space through nature. They are personalizing the living space with tributes to nature (posters, stickers, landscape paintings, seed packets pinned to walls). The piece is meant to contrast grey/monotone colors with a bright foliage/sky, signifying greener pastures beyond. The person living in the space is a city kid but loves/wishes for nature.

This project, I wanted to challenge myself with hand creating plants. I settled for various house plant species that are a bit simpler to make, while having color splash and shape variety to keep things interesting.

So far, I've created a couple plants and set up the basic room in Unreal Engine 5. I'm hoping to get community involvement from the start of this project and would really appreciate any feedback/opinions! I'll be posting updates as I go along.

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mhuang97

Red Valentine Aglaonema plant leaves

My second plant - I couldn't seem to figure out how to get the look I wanted procedurally so I settled for hand painting.

The next step is to figure out the process for modeling plant stems. I'm thinking of warping some cylinders and giving them 1:1 textures in Painter, since it's not like I'd be reusing the same stems per plant.

mhuang97

I'm back with updates! This past year has been busy for me as I enrolled in Think Tank Training Center. However, I've continued working on this collab project time to time. I hit a mental block with the plants, so turned to fleshing out the rest of the apartment.
For the walls I settled for a white brick and plaster. I created an instance of the master blend material for each wall since they were different meshes and had different UV sizes.

Next, I worked on the kitchen, practicing making it as modular as possible. I had quite a fun time detailing the dishwasher labels.












My partner worked on the couch, chair and CRT while I worked on the step bench and TV stand.

mhuang97

After a lot of googling, googling what to google, and reference gathering, I came around to setting up the foundation beams and trusses. I had to shuffle around the skylight to match the new beam placement.

mhuang97

Most recently, my partner and I fleshed out the scene further with more props, some of which are UV'd and just need to be textured.

I decided to create a new tileable brick texture in Designer. The new look was much more interesting so I opted to stick with brick on the interior as well. I created an instance with a slight X offset that I then vertex painted to reduce tiling.

I also experimented with the wood frame and door colors, settling for a dark gray scheme which felt like it fit better. Overall, the scene is starting to come together now that a lot of the foundation is in place. I'm looking forward to learning more at in the Environments for Games track at Think Tank Online which should help me with the plants.