The Wellspring Entity - UE5 Environment
Unreal 5 in Engine Screen Shot
Unreal 5 Engine Capture
Unreal 5 in Engine Screen Shot
Unreal 5 in Engine Screen Shot
Unreal 5 in Engine Screen Shot
Unreal 5 in Engine Screen Shot
Unreal 5 in Engine Screen Shot
The WellSpring Entity Zbrush Sculpt Render
Ground Scatter Boulder Zbrush Sculpt Render
Wavy Carved Monolith Zbrush Sculpt Render
Alien Carved Monolith Painter Textures in Unreal 5
The WellSpring Entity Platform Zbrush Sculpt Render
Pointed Monolith Zbrush Sculpt Render
Alien Carved Monolith Painter Textures in Unreal 5
The Wellspring Entity is based off the concept art of Ryan Gitter. I was looking for an opportunity to familiarize myself with the upcoming features of Unreal 5 and the amazing sci fi worlds that Ryan creates were the perfect subject matter for this study. I created the landscape mesh for the environment with a height map I designed in Gaea terrain generation software. I fused together concepts from Zach McNelley and Lincoln Hughes to build a landscape material that would automate some of the heavy lifting with flow map masks from Gaea in the early stages of scene construction. Then I was able to adjust the final look with hand painted material placement. The alien rock formations, the stair set and altar as well as the Wellspring entity creature were all sculpted in Zbrush, retopologized in Modo and textured with Substance 3D Painter. Knowing that for many of these items I wanted to take advantage of the capabilities of Nanite in UE5, I chose to automate some of the UV tasks in Houdini for easier iterations early on but refined the UVs by hand in the later stages with RizomUV to help ensure optimized textures. Materials are a combination of custom smart materials made in Substance 3D Painter as well as textures from Quixel and Substance Source materials that have been heavily altered with Substance Sampler, Substance Designer and Quixel Mixer. The environment's water utilizes the new water system available in beta in Unreal. I was also very interested in trying out the new Niagara particle system and while I still have a ton to learn when it comes to VFX I was able to throw together some very simple ground fog effects and a surprisingly okay smoke effect to crawl out of the Entity's vaporizing gem.
A very big thank you to everyone who gave me outstanding feedback during the development of this. I'm very grateful to have such talented minds to turn to.