The Missing Few (2020, UE4)
The Missing Few (2020), a game I worked on as a technical artist and later as lead. As part of the role I would direct and support other artists, making adjustments to their work, while working on the key assets personally. The game uses Unreal Engine 4, built in both c++ and blueprints with some experimental shaders.
The vestibules were explorable and the player usually had to visit several times during a puzzle sequence in the graveyard level, so they needed to really stand out. We have some original particle effects for the fire, composite materials and some careful staging so the player can spot the explorable vestibules.
The office in the basement of the funeral home. Excluding a few of the smaller clutter assets, I worked on almost all models, materials and shaders in the screenshots here. Some careful staging here too, as the important information for the player is the code on the yellow post-it-note. It's placed against the dark screen to draw attention.
The riverside scene made use of a significant amount of original foliage assets produced in speedtree, including weeds and so on which are visible under the water level. I built a custom water material for the scene (breakdown on the Material & HLSL page). The bridge itself made use of a composite of several materials.
The houses represented a challenge early on, as there is an entire town of these large assets, which we didn't want to repeat. Those that were up close were constructed using a modular workflow and given interiors, but that still left a significant number of others which required large static meshes with variation. There are a series of composite materials and BPs involved, which between various parameters account for half a dozen variations from building to building.
A corridor section in the funeral home, which was fully modular. The kit I built for this included three different themes which could be connected using the doorway parts- a hallway set, an office set (pictured higher up) and finally a morgue set. Each theme adhered to the same standards and could therefore be matched up for transitions from area to area.
Hoverbike (2021, Substance Painter)
Original geometry by Alexandr Zhilkin, texturing from me in Substance Painter at 2K resolution using a PBR setup.
From top left- Colour, Normal, Roughness, Metal, and AO textures all at 2k. This sheet covers the whole bike apart from the glass windshield, which was kept as a smaller second sheet as it required transparency; in engine this would be handled as a second material. |
Stylised shield (2022, UE5)
This stylised fantasy shield was sculpted in Zbrush, and retopologised in Maya. Texture work was done in Substance Painter with cleanup in Photoshop. The asset was set up with an ID map to allow for tints and variation to be applied in engine; this is the reason the colour texture below is almost greyscale. Each of the three materials involved (the two metals, plus a leather grip on the rear) could be individually adjusted within the material instance. There is a screenshot of the simple master material I made for the purpose (which does rely on some custom functions of mine).
The Missing Few props (2020, UE4)
A religious statuette, approximately 40cm in height made for The Missing Few (2020) which was in the Unreal Engine 4. This was made using Zbrush and Marvelous, UV work in Maya, and texturing in Mixer. I had some real fun here with the heavily verdigrised copper. The object was inspectable- that is, the player could examine the model closely- so it was 48,000 tris with some LODs to drop that down considerably at distance (This was also before nanite). This is a standard PBR setup, with colour, normals and a packed MRA map (Metal, Roughness, Ambient Occlusion).
A collection of food props from the game, which were used in the opening house scene. These were more simple from a technical standpoint, but required some Photoshopped labels, with fine details handled in Mixer. This is all PBR based work.
Above left, a set of clothes items from the same area. These were produced using Maya, Marvelous and Quixel Mixer, and had some additional material work in engine. Above right, an office chair from the game, built in Maya and textured with Quixel.
Navigator statue (Skyrim mod, 2022)
This statue was made for the mod Beyond Skyrim. As a mod for a 2011 game, the technical constraints on this were very strict. I was working with harsh polygon limits and the Blinn-Phong shading model (pre PBR). Sculpted in Zbrush, with Maya used for retopology and UV unwrapping, and Substance Painter for texturing. The basin in the centre was also filled with water in game.