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Project 01

Morning at the Corner Store...

1

Intro

This modular game environment is inspired by rural mountain towns and the classic local general stores of my home in Taiwan. I set out to recreate the nostalgic feeling of wandering through a quiet shop in search of snacks on a peaceful morning. This piece marks my first demo reel project and reflects the skills and knowledge I developed during my time at Gnomon. 

2

Asset Breakdowns

To convey the authenticity and atmosphere of Taiwanese culture, very specific cultural details are needed across all assets and textures. I used Maya, Marvelous Designer for modeling and Substance Painter for texturing. I'm responsible for all assets except the cat models by Radik Bilalov on Fab and vegetables from Quixel Megascans.

Taiwan Railway DR1000

This is a TRA DR1000 Diesel Railcar that runs through Pingxi Line, which is the rural region that inspired me to create this project. The train is modeled in Maya and textured in Substance Painter. It is a modular piece that consists of a side, a front, top parts, bottom parts and decals. It is assembled in Unreal Engine using blueprints.

Foliages

During late spring, Tung trees (Vernicia fordii) in the hills and mountains bloom white petals, their beautiful bloom earned the tree the name of "Snow in May" in Taiwan, and attracts many tourists  during bloom season. Other common spices of southern Asian sub-tropical foliage I made for this project include  the Pacific Island Silvergrass (Miscanthus floridulus),   the King Fern (Angiopteris evecta) and Pink Woodsorrel (Oxalis articulata).

3

Material Breakdowns

For this project, I created a total of six different tiling materials plus some variations for different damage/wear levels in Substance Designer. I wanted the materials to be able to hint the sub-tropical humid climate they're set in, therefore the strong presence of moss and moisture.

4

Procedural Tools

In this project I challenged myself to further develop my procedural modeling skill with Houdini and Unreal Blueprint. One of the challenge of this project is placing a big amount of props in the shop in a organic way, and hand placing every little prop would be very time consuming. To speed up my workflow, I created blueprints and Houdini to Unreal tool

Procedural Tools
[Unreal Blueprint Tool] Pipes
00:11
[Unreal Blueprint Tool] Water Tube
00:10
[Houdini to Unreal Tool] cables
00:17
[Unreal Blueprint Tool] Spline Decal
00:20
[Unreal Material Blend] Texture Painting
00:11
PropsOnShelfTool_demo

Unreal Blueprint Tool-
Props On Shelf Generator

I  was inspired by   Blake Freitas's   Asimov Bar project and his Unreal Blueprint for placing  props really fast. 

I developed a similar tool for my store shelves to achieve fast prop placement. With the tool, I'm able to assign different assets to the list and place them onto the shelf automatically, and nudge their position with exposed parameters in the editor afterwards. Huge thanks to my instructor Evan Hills for helping me out with the creation of this tool.

5

Unreal Material Blend

One of the things I appreciate the most about Unreal Engine is the ability to blend materials and paint  masks directly onto the model. With Texture painting, I am able to paint unique weather wears and paint peels...etc. onto the model really fast with using just tillable textures. It is a good way to break up the tiling and adding additional story telling details into our scene.

[Unreal Material Blend] Texture Painting

Thank you for reading!

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