Working to develop a Fantasy Environment piece, set inside my DnD world of Oxdara. This page showcases the coastline of Polantia, one of the Kingdoms. Inspired by Greek/Mediterranean environments, I wanted to showcase and push myself to create and show off a wide range of my skills in Environment Art, from asset creation, to Unreal materials and landscapes, as well as PBR materials created inside of Substance Designer.
To begin with I’ve started uploading the materials as and when I finish one, get it in engine and are happy with it. I will be updating this page as the project continues to show off the Landscape and modular building kit.
Grass Material
Getting back into the swing of things with Substance Designer, reacquainting myself and relearning skill I have not had to use since University. I started with creating the Grass material for the Polantian Scene.
To fully relearn and re-understand SD I followed along with a tutorial by Get Learnt w/ Chunck, making tweaks and alterations along the way to make a unique material of my own still. The major example here is the small patches of clovers, creating them from Shape Generators and transform nodes, and then blending them into the material.
Rock Material
Starting off using the basic tutorial on the Substance Designer YouTube channel, I built off that base, trying my hand and creating my own rock shapes. I used a Cube 3D node and some blended gradients to cut out some rocky shapes, running them through a tile sample, and adding warps, blends, blurs and a bunch of level nodes to build a chunky rock. Then using some reference images to pick out gradient colours, going for a white/Greek style of rock as Polantia is inspired geographically by Greece and the Mediterranean.
Sand Material
Starting the same as the rock material, using the basic tutorial on the Substance Designer Youtube channel for sand, I built up the texture, blending in fractal base noise and other small dots to create a detailed sandy texture. I used the same Cube 3D method I used in my rock material, to instead create small pebbles and stones, height blended into the sand itself and masked off to stand out, just breaking up the continuous yellow colour and grainy texture.
Gravel Material
Working on a very simple material without following a tutorial first. I created some small pebble shapes using the Cube 3D node, cutting into the cube using a few gradient linear nodes. I then compiled them into two pattern sampler nodes, creating a larger pebble generator, and a smaller, bulk pebble generator. I height blended the two together, creating a simple gravelly material to use around and under large rock formations and along pathways within the demo level. I exposed the x/y counts for both pebble generators so I could play around with the amount and size directly inside Unreal Engine, importing the material using the Substance 3D plugin in Unreal.