Adam Galles
Environment Artist
The Loghouse
The original Concept was very heavy in shape language and I loved the story of a dilapidated log house with a story. I wanted to make the setting more eerie and push myself to change the location of the house to a river, tackling the water and making the scene more dynamic in the process.
I drew over the initial concept when I started, making sure that I had a good sense of scale before starting my modeling for the project. (however these dimensions would later change to better fit my camera and harsh shape language)
Concept
The design of the house is from Jang Jae Ok and
the river concept is from Arthur Bourgeais
Process
Throughout the different stages of my workflow I ensured that the story was always readable, and that the environment felt lived in. Many of the changes included damage, wear, and subtle storytelling elements including chopped trees, a boat, piles of logs, and overall making the house start to slump into itself.
Materials
All materials were created in Substance Designer and rendered in Marmoset Toolbag.
All textures were packed into ORM pack maps.
They were then applied with material layers and shaders. I used a variety of custom shaders for every object, with techniques such as pixel depth offset, height blending, RGB masking, vertex painting, and world aligned textures.
I created trims and normal bevel trims to limit geometry and increase fidelity, especially in areas such as the wood planks.
Kits
Objects were sculpted in Z-brush then topologized in MAYA. High poly bakes were created in substance painter, and used with the tileable textures to maintain a higher resolution final result.
Some objects, such as the bricks and rocks used RGB masking to have adjusted tints and textures. Many others were set up to be RGB painted with detailed height maps to improve fidelity with nanite displacement.
The foliage and Trees were created within Speed Tree to be both high fidelity and optimized.
4 different LODS were created for each foliage asset, from LOD 0 all the way to billboards to increase project frame rate while decreasing render times.
Utilizing some simple winds and generation forces were key in speed tree to give sway and subtle motion to the environment. This was also overlayed with a camera world position so they scene wouldn't chug with too many foliage assets.
