Through my second semester at Bradford University, I had the option to take my environmental skills to the next level in the Masters  module of last years Environment Set and Prop Creation.

 

Once I was selected to go ahead with switching to this module I got the brief document from my tutor. 

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The brief was to create a next-gen Mario Kart track and so I decided to create an environment that has a certain mystery and culturally  important. 

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I started to research as much inspiration as I could about the Polynesian culture. This ranged from buildings to masks.

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Once I had gained enough information and inspiration, I decided to use Easter Island as the layout template as this was a perfect choice that seeped in culture and mystery. 

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I use a variety of tools to get the island size and shape. Though sculpting I made a high poly version of the island and from there I re-topologised for a low poly version. With these separate meshes, I baked in Substance for height and normal maps. After I baked I started painting the material.s to which the result you see now. 

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Due to the texture limit of 120mb I used .png for everything as well as the majority of the resolution sizes at 512x512, thankfully most of the textures fit on a 4k texture map which helped with organising the Hypershader and Maya scene as a whole.

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For submission I choose to render with Arnold as I wanted to explore what it could offer. I feel like some of the single render images came out too noisy but I'm glad the camera fly-through came out nice. Because it was my first time rendering with Arnold, I had to make sure everything was good to go but unfortunately I made mistakes with meshes in places they shouldn't be. I would of gone back to re-render but due to time constraints I could not spend another 3 days rendering again. 

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Throughout this module I learned a more about the pipeline rendering aspects which will go a long way in my next environment project.

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Details:

Game Environment

2018

607,975 Triangle

Autodesk Maya 

Arnold Renderer

Substance Painter

Photoshop

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