Overgrown Ruins: Team enviroment

Environment assignment! 

This was made with 2 other people over the course of 8ish weeks, made in Unreal Engine 4. We switched about 6 weeks in, about as soon as the engine came out, immediately jumped ship. 

So the idea started off as an overgrown manor house that had slided down a hill, and had rocks and cliff faces forcing their way through the structure over time, as well as having a rain forest kinda thing grow over it.

Final video render: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_3fjEb5yrgk

We started off by gathering reference and developing concepts and grey boxes, and after that developing an idea of all of the assets that would be needed, who would make them, and the assignments that each one of us would have to undertake and understand. I focused on foliage. I was also to assemble the scene in (at the time) UDK, which I then later did in UE4. We used Trello to organize and distribute work.

I was responsible for the foliage, a fair bit of architecture (the mural at the back, stairs, railing) and the rocks and cliff faces forcing their way through the structure, as well as putting the scene together in UE4 and lighting the scene.

Reference collage:

Concepts and grey boxes:

These are some full scene renders with everyone else's work:

...and some shots with only my work (Other's shaders are grayed out):

A wire frame capture of the scene:

As you can see, the foliage adds the most poly's of anything else, surprisingly though it didn't effect the frame rate noticeably

Some in game renders of just my stuff:

Texture Breakdowns:

Overall I'm pretty happy with the result, although I feel we could have done better. I should have spent more time studying and practicing 3D foliage, and maybe have spent more time on the textures and in the shader editor. I would have loved to have a very light particle fog just over the water, but we didn't have time, and hadn't learnt the particle editing system. Some volumes for the light shafts would've been amazing around the tree.

Massive thanks to  Adam Newman (http://adamnewmanart.blogspot.com.au/) and Rhys Smith (http://rhys3d.blogspot.com.au/), they worked really hard to get this done.