Vanessa Andrade - 3D Animation & Games

Specialist Pathway - https://miro.com/app/board/o9J_kipRz0o=/ Live Brief and FMP - https://miro.com/app/board/o9J_lZRPp2A=/ Portfolio - https://www.artstation.com/vanessa_andrade

This is the final result after so many months of hard work. It was difficult to work on the project at times, especially because we could not work together in the same space and at times it felt unmotivated. In the end, I think we did the best we could with the circumstances we were in, I am still very happy with the final result of the project and think the team did an amazing job.

After I modeled the book cover in Maya and I rigged it. I then used substance painter to texture it, which was a fairly simple process since I just had to put a leather material and apply the work I did in photoshop with an alpha that I turned to gold. After I gave it to Holly to animate it and set it up in UE4.

Since Naz (the creature modeler of the group) was having a hard time doing the fur for the creature I have decided to help him and do the rig as well as pose the cat creature, wich helped the group saving some time.

I really enjoyed working on these... In the beginning, I did some blockouts resembling medieval houses but later on, I realized that I would like to go for a natural/dystopian type of architecture. While doing the houses I also had the idea to make them look like mushrooms, which I believe I was able to achieve. I encountered some problems with booleans, but I quickly searched some tutorials and was able to fix them. The biggest challenge really was using Marvelous Designer for the first time. Overall, after getting used to the new program everything went smoothly and I did the clothes without problems. Texturing the house took me a bit of time, as I had to create some alphas, as well as search for the right set of textures, Lucian helped by providing some textures from substance source. Overall, I really liked the final look of the houses.

The mushrooms were a bit out of my comfort zone, usually, I feel more comfortable modeling and texturing hard-surface, so the mushrooms were a challenge for me. I had to double my research and to help me start I have decided to message an artist that does amazing foliage and I really admire it. To my surprise, he replied and gave me some amazing feedback on what workflow to use as well as special techniques. I would have liked to had more time to do some plants and other mushroom variations, however, I started doing the villager's houses and once I was finished some members of the group wanted help with different things, so my priority was to help and do some other important bits.

My main goal for this project was to build a balanced composition and try to imitate as close as possible my reference image. I feel very confident with modeling from the past 2 years so given that I started this project much later than what I was supposed to due to difficult reasons (not having a computer that could handle all the software / moving house / not having internet for more than half a month) I thought it would be a good time to improve my compositing and mate-painting skills. In the past, I was very curious about this path but I was afraid to try it out, so now I finally had the opportunity. This project helped me a lot in understanding that I still have a long journey ahead of me to learn, while it was fun to try and experiment with new stuff I understood that I have a lot more enjoyment by modeling assets and create game environments where I can visualize my 3d scene from different angles/perspectives. This type of project would be more suitable for the film industry when there is the need to have a still backround, I found that what I liked the most about environments is the possibilities when changing the cameras or making close-ups to my assets as well as having the possibility to walk around almost like a character in a game. Having such a vast and dense environment to work in also felt like at times it was easy to get lost in the density of the scene. Overall it was a very good study to make, but I do not think I want to follow this direction and even tho I am happy with the results I achieved, I will not be using this piece for my portfolio as I think it can be confusing for a future recruiter to see such a big change from modeling to the game industry to a compositing piece that relates more with a VFX pipeline.

Here is the video I made for the mockup with the fox animation (please put the max. quality when watching).

Here we can see the other frames I did for the mock-up. After building the enviroment I have decided to import this fox and put it into the enviroment to give a sense of what the spirit would look like in the final version.

For our pitch, we divided the environment shots between the three environment artists. Using Unreal Engine I kit-bashed Quixel and Marketplace assets to produce these shots for the mock-up. I have included both renders, the ones with the photoshop effect and the ones without.

This was an initial environment concept I did. Since we did not had an enviroment concept artist and time was short, we have decided to do the scene in unreal and then apply a filter in photoshop.

This are all the amazing concepts that Rodrigo and Naz came up with

Finally, it was time to give words to our new idea.

YEAR 3
☾ MOODBOARDS ☾
 After a long discussion, we settled on a plot we were all happy with. We also decided to change from a game to a cinematic since we had 3 enviroment artists. This time we took heavy inspiration from Balinese Mythology and then we came up with a few moodboards.

Immediately we knew we wanted to do a fantasy game. Our first idea consisted on the story of a warrior that goes on a journey to fight an evil king that overgrown by greed tries to kill all dragons in the kingdom so he can keep the powerful powers of the magical creatures to himself. Later on, after speaking with the Waste Creative team, we have decided to change the story and explore different ideas. The folowing images are concepts from Rodrigo for the first idea.

➜  https://miro.com/app/board/o9J_kugPSHo=/