Ancestral Tomb
Excited to share my latest personal project! Environment fan art heavily inspired by the ancestral tombs of TES3: Morrowind, but more of my own take on it. Built in Unreal Engine 5.4. The only external assets used are free Unity flipbooks for the fire effects
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An ancestral tomb for a noble house. A place for the living to visit and give offerings and prayers for protection and wisdom to the venerated dead. After death, the bodies are cremated and placed in the ash pits and urns according to their status in life, with the ruling bloodline in the place of honor at the end of the hall, lesser nobles elevated on the sides, and favored servants and commoners in the largest pit in the middle.
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I wanted to create a full semi-realistic environment while pushing the detail level from what I'm normally used to. It was also a good way to exercise some of my less exercised skills like lighting and VFX. I limited the scope to a single hall to keep the workload under control, since I was leaving my comfort zone and facing some unknowns, and it turned out to be the right decision in the end. Everything in the scene is made by me, apart from the flipbooks used for the fire and smoke particles, which were free resources from Unity.
Mood and reference board
Most of the kit used in the scene. For the architecture I chose to use pretty much only trims and tileables, leaving scuplting and unique textures for props.
The props for the most part were sculpted with unique textures, with a few exceptions
I sculpted the mummies using the zbrush human male base mesh, which I then posed with zsphere armatures. I haven't done character modeling, so both them and the skulls were great anatomy practice
Decals are essential for tying the scene together and easily adding extra detail. I used both projection and mesh decals depending on what the situation called for.
Blending debris piles to the ground using decals. The pile and decal textures are using world coordinates, and I'm using SDFs (instead of RVTs) to blend the intersecting normals with the normals of the underlying geometry, thus hiding the contact seam.
UV scaling based on physical scale. You can also mask parts with vertex colors to signify parts that the scaling should ignore, e.g. wood end grain. A simple material function, but incredibly useful when using modules with trims and tileables.
POM, single-sample triplanar and a crystal shader in action. The emission can be affected by the sun direction, creating a faux-passthrough effect.
Your basic vertex color blending. Is driven by heightmaps and supports 4 textures, and an extra intermediary texture between layers 1 and 2. Vertex alpha controls the mask contrast.
Candle flame/billboard material, which might be a bit of an overkill. Not using Niagara, it's just a material. Requires the pivots to be baked to UV1 and 2 in Maya, for which I made a Python script.
Swaying cloth for the longer banners. The sway influence is driven by a gradient in MRO map alpha, which is also used to mask out the rippling normals. The sway phase is offset and randomized by the actor location.