Crystal Canyon / Mechanized Guardian of the Valley

My Crystal Canyon environment from my Game Creation 2 class with Anton Napierala at Gnomon. The original idea was that the large vintage camera-based mech in the background serves as a guardian of the land from a past age. It draws power from the energized crystals throughout the land, using wires that it was hooked up to long ago. It currently sits inactive and dilapidated, waiting to be utilized again. Happy with how this turned out, got to learn a lot about more functions of Unreal through this, as well as environmental storytelling.

Props such as the Crystals and the Guardian were made with the standard pipeline of creating assets between Maya and Zbrush, and then baking high resolution detail onto them if necessary and texturing them in Substance Painter before importing them into Unreal Engine for shader creation and placement. The terrain was blocked out with terrain sculpting tools in UE4, then taken into Gaea to generate more refined terrain, then taken back into Unreal and sculpted on top of once more with terrain tools. Megascan rocks are mixed into the terrain to blend it all together more seamlessly. The ground textures were created by hand in substance designer and blended together in a landscape material in Unreal Engine, while textures for the flowers and grass were taken from Megascans, modified, and used in SpeedTree to generate foliage. Elements like god rays and light bloom were added by using volumetric fog and post-processing effects in Unreal and then enhanced in Nuke.

(Music credit on video showcase - “Memories” by Sean Williams)