Jeremy Fort
CREATIVE PORTFOLIO
VIDEO GAMES
Video game industry produced work
Gravitale
Description - My role on this project as one of the 3d artists included:
Creating the foliage asset library
Handling the procedural layout of the foliage
Establishing the groundwork for an asset management system to support the needs of the artists both in house and remote.
Managing and maintaining the landscape maps, island mesh alignment and worldspace positions.
Creating Niagara VFX elements for use around the environment
Creating other environment features and assets for use in the level - Modelling (Maya), Texturing (Substance painter), Material setup (Unreal).
Lighting and visual composition for key views.
Icon creation and rendering with Maya and Redshift.
Rendering island turntables
Establishing a suitable QC process for assessing the islands.
My first assignment on this project was creating the foliage library. This included reworking existing assets and modelling new ones, while establishing a style that fitted with the concept art. Materials were also setup with parameter controls so colour's and glowing elements could be later controlled for additional variation.
Making use of the landscape toolset and layer system in Unreal Engine 5, I was able to drive the placement of foliage and pathways onto the islands using alpha maps. I used a set of maps per island type, and by leveraging the procedural foliage toolset, was able to populate the islands with assets targeted to specific areas across all landscapes.
I was then able to fine tune the parameters of the foliage assets to dial in scale, density, slope angles and collision radius' that not only resulted in an artisitcally pleasing result, but also took into account how it impacted player traversibility on the undulating terrain. This was a key consdieration, as there were certain locations on the islands the player needed to access, and we also wanted to encourage exploration through the denser parts of the foliage without concern of accessibility. Being that a procedural system was being utilised for variation of foliage across numerous islands, much care had to be taken to ensure this was mitigated both by the maps and foliage parameters as much as possible.
Other environment features such as waterfalls, ponds, and hidden rooms were also required, and as such modelling work took place outside of the engine to create these. Establishing a two way worldspace offset was required to support this process so we could quickly and efficiently operate on environment components in context of the landscape in either application.
Another core part of my tasks was to establish various Niagara VFX elements and their associated materials. These were made not only to supplement the environment and add some life to areas, but to cover various other general uses such as item pickup and triggered events throughout the game.
Trailer here:
