Agoraphobia - Realtime Environment Design UE4
I created this environment ealier this year for a course with the theme "Twin Worlds", the idea was to connect two contrasting environments through some kind of portal. I decided to create a very peaceful and relaxed indoor environment, with an alien and dreamlike, desolate outside. I really like Alice in Wonderland and wanted to create the feeling of going through the rabbit hole, and all elements still being there, but in a jumbled mess.
I started with some simple concepts in Blender and then made a list of all the assets needed. I then modeled all objects in Blender and textured them in Substance Painter. For the environment I used Substance Designer to create textures and trim sheets. To give everything a more stylised look, I created a post-process material in Unreal, which adds black outlines and highlights the edges.
I used the title image to test out the path tracer, which takes quite a while to render indoors. The video and all shots from it were created using the deferred renderer.
All furniture was textured in Substance Painter. In order to maximise texture space, most faces that can't be seen from the front were removed or replaced with a black material, to help with mesh distance field ambient occlusion.
Objects were also textured in Substance Painter. But most of them are grouped so they share texture space. In total there are about 73 items with 10 textures. Books have different colour variations, which are done through materials in Unreal.
All buildings were assembled from a very simple set of meshes. They are also missing any sides that can't be seen, which is something that I could do for a video, but wouldn't for a game.
The piece of pavement shows how low poly especially the outdoor assets are, this actually combines really well with the post-process shaders I used, because the edges are easier to detect. Of course it also saves some time modeling.
Indoors I used some trim sheets for the building itself. Some of the outdoor materials have color variations which are done through Unreal. The pavement uses decals for the paint.