Abandoned Place Module
"Create a place forgotten to time"
Research and Testing
The brief of this module is "“Imagine a place forgotten to time. Consider the original purpose of the space, what happened to result in its abandonment, and how time and weather has eroded it." My first thoughts after this were to make an abandoned battlefield so I created a mood board to gather some ideas. I wanted to create a more modern approach so I looked at abandoned and old tanks as well as destroyed buildings.
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I then used made a simple building in Maya and then used Houdini to test create a building collapse to simulate one being abandoned and destroyed. When creating a modular kit I would be able to make a realistic destroyed environment around my hero asset as I can use the non destructive process to tweak the building until I get a model I am happy with and then import that into Unreal.
Hero Asset
I wanted my hero asset to help build the environmental story telling by making a bus stop that looked as if it had not been used in years helping the scene look abandoned. I first started with a mood board to gather ideas on what I wanted to create and then used this to create a basic block-out of the shelter. After this I used Maya's shatter function to create small shards of glass which I placed around the bus stop, which you can see clearer in the Arnold renders. After this I created a high poly version in Zbrush and baked this onto the original model so when texturing in substance painter, I could get a higher level of detail. I had a lot of fun messing around with the various materials in substance painter and making the graffiti for the bus stop to give it a more dystopian and abandoned feel. You can see in the bottom right images the final textures which I imported into my Unreal project
Background Buildings
The first image shows the outcome of using Houdini to create a destroyed building using non-destructive processes. However the outcome of this process left the rubble from the building very unoptimised and couldn't be used in Unreal Engine 5 without crashes. As well as this I also had issues with assigning textures after the building had been destroyed and as a result I had to switch to another program in order to complete the project.
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Therefore I used blender to create a basic room layout and used the array function to quickly make the buildings I would destroy. After applying sub-divisions I selected the area which I wanted to simulate and then used the quick-explode function to get the desired result. In Blender it was much easier to control the amount of destruction I required than compared to Houdini and the final product was a lot less demanding of computer performance. After texturing I imported my buildings into Unreal.
Tree Creation
To further the feeling of an abandoned place I wanted to make the scene feel uninhabited even by vegetation and therefore I wanted to make some dead trees to do so. I used a program called "Tree It" which is a node based system used to design trees and foliage. It was quite simple to learn and allowed for multiple trees to be made quickly. When imported into Unreal I was also able to give the trees a wind function even though I am not intending to make a cinematic, but it may be useful to know for future projects.
I have create a tillable road and pavement using substance sampler to place my assets on within the project. As well as this I added local fog and Niagara dust system functions to add to the abandoned and almost horror like landscape. I then placed cameras around my scene to take renders of it. Here is the outcome.
Final Touches and Renders
