THE LOST SANCTUARY
Project Overview
game design/Game Art/environment Art
This is a stand-alone scene in my personal worldview, using ue rendering as the main processing tool, to try and set and create a slightly solemn atmosphere of a sanctuary relic. For this scene, I chose to use a variety of software to increase production efficiency.
Role
Game Designer
3D Artist
Genre
3d scene design
Software
Blender
DAZ 3D
MarvelousDesigner
Zbrush
Unreal Engine 5
Pre-draft Design
In terms of design, I referenced the background setting of the story. This scene was once a place used to record the secrets of the church, so it was built in the middle of a canyon while having a lot of sculptures and patterns with religious intentions.
Pre-White Box Construction
Given this spatial structure, I chose to light the scene with both top-lit natural light and down-lit artificial light, to represent the scene after the collapse of the dome after its abandonment, as well as the two different atmospheres of the scene when it was still in use.
For the production, I chose to use blender as the basic asset creation software, and I modeled most of the architectural assets in the scene in blender.
Production of Humanoid Sculptures
In addition to this, the stone sculpture of the cloaked character in the scene was created using both DAZ and MarvelousDesign. I first used the standard male octogenarian body in DAZ and posed it in my ideal pose, then imported the posed model into MarvelousDesign to create the fabrics, then imported them into Zbrush to stylize and smooth out the fabric poses, and then finally I imported the model back into blender to build and optimize it.
Production of Materials
After the asset preparation, I imported the scene into ue for material creation and lighting. In the material creation, the scene is mainly composed of stone material. However, after some simple attempts, I realized that using only one layer of stone material is not enough, and it will make the whole scene look too thin and monotonous. So I chose to use a master material that can be blended with the material mixing function to create the whole scene. With the blending of multiple layers of materials, including sand and dust, the scene became realistic and believable.
After I finished these steps, I realized that even with material blending, the whole scene would be too monotonous if it was all stone, so I introduced green bronze as the material for the statues and decorative elements in the scene, which enriched the scene to a great extent, and I also used the master material with material blending on top of the bronze material, so as to blend the new material with the original material in the same scene. I have also used a master material for the bronze material that can be used for material blending, so that the new material and the existing one can blend better in the scene.
Optimization of the Environment
After finishing the basic materials, I chose to enrich the scene with natural environment assets from bridge and blueprinted surface clouds.
For the small stone assets, I imported them into UE's vegetation system and painted them on the whole scene using brushes, which greatly improved my efficiency in creating the scene.
In terms of the use of the sheet clouds, I placed two sheet clouds in the near and far distance, and they were positioned in the scene to neutralize the rigidity of the scene with some soft cloud outlines in the overall hard scene.
Final Effect Outputs
In terms of rendering and post, because ideally this is a game scene, I didn't choose to tweak the rendering results in post compositing software. The color grading part was all done in UE using postprocess volume. In the case of natural lighting, my coloring preference was to reduce the saturation in the scene and slightly increase the contrast and dark corners to simulate the feeling of strong contrast in daylight. For artificial lighting, I used the lighting idea of strengthening the influence of the light color on the overall scene, in order to emphasize the tense atmosphere of the special scene. Finally, I use UE's movie render queue to render the image.
