Speed Ra(y)cers: Believe the Unbelievable
Roles: Environment and Lighting Artist
Software Used: Substance painter, Maya, Quixel, and Unreal Engine 4
Summary
Believe the Unbelievable is a project brought to completion by four team members: Vivi Kang (texture and lighting artist), Jessica Teague (VFX artist), Victor Lin (compositor, and environment artist), and me.
We were mentored by industry professionals from The Mill for 10 weeks.
Final Render
Process Breakdown
In week one, Victor Lin (compositor and lighting artist), Vivi Kang (material and lighting artist), Jessica Teague (FX artist), and me (immersive and environment artist) were assigned to a team. We started off by introducing ourselves and telling what our goals are and what we expect to get from this class. Each of us has different specialities and we kind of kept that in mind as we brainstormed our ideas. Initially, we came up with four concepts for our first in-class presentation and after hearing some feedback we narrowed it down to one.
This is our team's idea.
With the theme in mind, I started off by looking at a lot of references and automobile videos. I could list them out but that would be pretty long. I also have to keep in mind that most of the members are more inclined towards night scenery for this project.
The colour selection scene starts in a sci-fi car garage/charge station environment. Then the car is chased by drones towards a tunnel and to the highway. In the end, the car jumps out of the screen into a room.
My concern was how I could make the environment looks realistic and sci-fi at the same time. A lot of the sci-fi references that we found are not realistic enough, so I had to look at a lot of real-life references as well.
Moodboard
The above pictures were our initial idea. We, however, changed it later on. Since the garage is going to be shown in the first shot of our project's sequence, I wanted it to invoke a feeling of calm before the storm, and that is why I, initially, went for a bluish tint along with a clean design for the interior.
After deciding that we are changing the design of the first shot. I made some quick sketches to iterate some ideas. I personally like doing sketches before blocking out the entire environment in 3D. This process allow me to get a better picture of the initially blurry image I had in mind.
After that, I started blocking out the basic shapes in Blender, and then move to Unreal to set up the lighitng.
Now that the rough block out was done, I started going into the details of each asset.
I compiled a lot of reference pictures to identify the detailing of each object in the scene ranging from the big modular pieces to smaller objects like crates.
Shown below are some of the assets I have made. Some of them are textured in substance painter, while some are textured in unreal using quixel assets.
