3D Environments

Background

Four environments built in Unreal. One was modelled from scratch for a client, the other three are studies. Lighting is what connects them: a desert at midday, a coast under flat overcast, and a museum interior lit through tall windows are three different problems, and I wanted all three rather than three versions of one.

Building from scratch

The house is the one I modelled. A client wanted their digital doubles placed in a specific interior and set the layout themselves, so the job was building to a fixed plan rather than designing one.

I built the structure in Maya and brought it into Unreal, filling out the scene with Marketplace assets where the schedule ruled out modelling everything.

It shipped as part of the digital double work for the client, and the doubles themselves are written up in the digital human pipeline.

Laying out and lighting

The museum, the desert and the coast are original scenes. The assets came from the Unreal Marketplace, so the work in these is composition, camera and light rather than modelling. They were built to practise lighting inside a real-time engine rather than waiting on a renderer.

The museum is the one I am happiest with. Hard, low sun through the windows gives the marble something to do, and the reflected bounce carries the light back into the room instead of leaving the far wall flat.

The desert is the opposite problem. Open sky, no bounce surfaces, and nothing to stop the light. It needed the rock formations to give the frame any depth at all.

The coast is the coldest of the three. Overcast light is soft and directionless, which makes it unforgiving, because there are no shadows to shape anything and the scene has to hold together on materials and silhouette.