UAT student Baylee Balsimo Ketelhut describes her process working through this Ancient Envinronment across two Game Art & Animation classes with UAT Professor Jorge Portillo. He stated "She made all the 3D models in GAA220, Environment and FX using 3Ds Max and Maya and Textured it in GAA240 Texturing, this environment came out Epic!"
For this environment, I started with gathering a ton of references from my own photos to 3D models on ArtStation. The art style I referenced the most was from Ghost of Tsushima/Sekiro. I came to the conclusion that I wanted to make a secluded river town that lived off the base of a waterfall.
I began modeling the simple props, such as Torii, stone statues, lanterns, etc. Then came modular walls and floors, where I made outdoor walls and architecture for a Kyoto-style home. I made sure that every section looked like it was supposed to be divided to make the buildings look more believable when staged in engine.
For the organic models, the first items were 3 rocks I sculpted using an outsourced 3dsMax tool call MultiMesher. While they are difficult to notice in the environment at first, I used them to make my cliffs and mountains more dimensional. I do that by staging them throughout the edges of cliffs and terrain walls. As for trees, I made a bamboo tree, a shrub, a wisteria tree, and a bamboo cluster tree. These were modeled mostly using curves in Maya, while the grass, leaves, and flowers were all made with alpha textures and staged manually or with MASH in Maya.
The last two things I did with this environment was the complex props and center piece. I made a fish fountain, a dragon spout, and some other props that I didn't have time to texture. For these, I used a combination of Maya sculpt tools and the Quad Draw tool (my favorite!). For any facial structure I tackled, such as on the dragons, I used the Quad Draw tool to create custom topology for the eyes, nose, and mouth. The dragons each have spikes which I used MASH to procedurally duplicate them along the curve of the dragon's spine.
The hardest part, of course, was the center piece itself, which was a giant statue with two dragons. I kid you not, I studied every reference I could find on the internet for 2 hours trying to figure out what was happening in the statue. I decided to go more simple to protect my sanity, and added spirals/scales through textures and normal maps.
As for texturing, I created each texture from base-images (such as cement) and added a lot of painting/filtering to them in Photoshop. Most items consisted of trim sheets, totaling up to around 5 modular texture sheets. Other textures include ~8 tiling terrain textures, and over 10 UV mapped textures. All of which had normal maps applied in Substance Sampler.
Lastly, everything had to go into Unity! I made a terrain, painted the textures, and slowly added more depth/mountains over time. I staged everything to match the initial concept, added water, and falling particles from the trees. I also didn't manually place every tree, I used the terrain tool where you can paint trees.
Check out UAT's Game Art & Animation and other degree options here.