Wandering Preservatory – 3D Environment Art FMP
This is Wandering Preservatory, my Final Major Project at UCA – a steampunk-inspired mech towing an airborne greenhouse across a desolate wasteland. This piece is based on my own concept art. It was modelled and animated in Maya, textured in Substance Painter and rendered in Unreal Engine 5, with some finer details added in ZBrush.
I modelled everything except the foliage and trees, which are Quixel Megascans that I added in the interest of time and art direction. Most textures are either procedural or modified versions of the ones included in Substance Painter, although I made all the ground textures myself from real-life photos.
One of the biggest challenges I faced was trying to communicate the sense of scale in this piece, which is why I opted to animate the scene. This was done in Maya and Unreal Engine.
Of my four A4 pages of experimentation and development sketches, this is a selection of the concepts that informed the final result the most.
Mech Body Topology Comparison
Mech Leg, Knee & Foot Topology Comparison
In-engine, the greenhouse is made up of one segment which uses different UV islands for glass variation. In Substance Painter, several instances are shown so that I can make the texture repeat seamlessly and paint each glass variation separately.
The mech was rigged and skinned in Maya. Most joint influences were assigned a uniform weight of 1, since this is a hard surface model that does not deform...
...With the exception of the four toes on each foot, which act as spring bellows. Here, the weights were applied and smoothed as a gradient, so that the springs would compress realistically.
The inner knee mechanism was, in hindsight, a little too ambitious. It was achieved by instantiating a chain mesh along a curve via Maya's MASH system. I then used cluster deformers to constrain the ends of the chain curve to the mechanism for animation.
Animation was done in Maya using Inverse Kinematics for positioning the legs.