Project Revive: Bioscience Lab Modular Environnent

Finally. Here is an overview of my very first modular game environment created and rendered in Unreal Engine 4.15, for an end-of-year project.

This is a living room which is part of a space bioengineering laboratory.
The story behind tells us that some advanced alien civilisation invested an asteroid, trying to recreate a habitable biosphere after their star died and blew up their home planet (hence the project name Revive).

The scene consists of about 70 different modular units and props, created in 3ds Max.

The maximum texture resolution allowed for this project was 2048*2048. Also I could only have 1 material ID per object. For all the 3D assets (except the organic elements) I decided to use 1 texture set, which I progressively filled up throughout the process, primarily in Photoshop.

The main shader uses:
– Diffuse RGB texture,
– Normal RGB texture,
– Emissive RGB texture,
– Roughness, Metalness, AO and Opacity mask packed in one RGBA texture,
– A triplanar mapped dirt texture.


Textures used for all props and modular units.

The final render looks very new, clean and shiny, but since we are in a bioenginiering lab it makes sense, somehow.

Unlit

Lighting only

More screenshots:

See this on my Artstation

Reptilian Bioscientist

Hey, this is Frank! In fact I don’t know his name. But he is a very good scientist, working at some bioengineering laboratory in… well, in space. On an asteroïd. Yes. That’s it.  I will explain everything, just later.He (we assume Frank) is part of my end-of-year project (which is coming next).
The high poly model was done entirely in Zbrush (including the high frequencies of the organic).

It was the first time I worked hard surfaces in Zbrush.

I did a retopo in 3D-Coat, then I exported to Maya to tweak the UVs, skinned the model onto an existing rig, and some other adjustments. The final low poly model counts about 30k tris.

I did some vertex painting in Zbrush to bake the colors into an ID map in xNormal, along with a first Normal map, AO and Curvature before importing everything in Substance Painter to finish the texturing.

Then I integrated Frank in Unreal, tweaked the shaders and made him use his legs a little bit.


Making a humanoid reptilian Character was part of the original request. I didn’t want to go for a feroce space tyrex in steel armor with a lasergun, I went for a … let say a peaceful scientist thinking of his own place in the universe when he raises his look towards the cosmic space the eyes full of wonders…

References for the safety suit:

 

See this on my ArtStation

Highlands Boulders

An arrangement of modular rocks sculpted in Zbrush and textured in 3DCoat.

The final set has 11 rock units and a polycount of about 14k tris.

Roughness, Albedo/Color and Normal map:

Rendered in UE4 (4K textures) (do not pay attention to that random ground texture):

I wanted to make them look realistic so I made my textures out of raw pictures (actually of a piece of an old rock wall) that I projected on the low poly models. The cracks and most of the details in the normals come from the baked high poly.

The set also includes 3 little clumps of moss. Timewise not very efficient for filling an entire scene or even covering a single rock with these, but, anyway… this was part of the experiment.

Sketchfab (2K textures)