Genesis

'Genesis' is an environment that explores the moments suspended between creation and decay. It was crafted as part of my Final Media Project for my Masters in Games Art and Design at the University of Hertfordshire.

This scene explores an early concept art from West Studio when they were collaborating with Riot Games during the inception of Valorant. Being an avid gamer and a game enthusiast, I was particularly fond of the artstyle and the workflows implemented in Valorant. Seeing that it totally fit my specialization in stylized art, I decided to use the concept art as my base and recreate it in real time.

This environment was really humbling to work on and taught me more about direction and technical aspects of game design. All of the assets were created in Blender and the foliage was created in TreeIt, a free alternative to SpeedTree. Some of those assets were chucked into ZBrush for stylized sculpting and were fed into Substance Painter for PBR and handpainted textures. All of the tile materials crafted for the project was created entirely in Substance Designer. Finally, everything was concocted together inside Unreal Engine where I created materials and functions for the same. This also marks my first project actively testing around Niagara particles alongisde Cascade particles. It was confusing at first, but soon resembled Maya and Blender's particle systems.