Final Renders:

Reference Image:

In November-December 2019, teammates and I recreated Mark Twain’s foyer to sharpen our 3D environmental art skills in this five-week project. The team of four used the following software programs:

• Maya 2019 – whiteboxing and modeling
• Substance Designer and Painter – textures
• ZBrush – statue posing
• Unreal 4 – lighting and rendering

I was a project manager, modeler, and lighter, but more specifically I worked on the following:

• Set due dates on Google Calendar, created the Trello board for asset management, and created a reference sheet for the team. Fortunately, I was able to find plenty of references to pull from the Mark Twain Museum’s website. I compiled the images into a pdf: pdf file of reference
• Drew concept art to clarify blurry details in the reference images.
• Created ZSphere rigs in ZBrush to pose meshes and lowered the polycount with ZRemesher.
• Utilized NURBS Curves for the intricate crown molding, transforming them to polygons and cleaning them up.
• Modeled the staircase and its railings, using a mixture between NURBS Curves and polygon modeling techniques.
• Placed finalized assets into the Unreal scene.
• Lit the room to achieve the final look.

Detail close-ups to help my partners in modeling the wall paneling and the corner of the staircase light base.

Clarifying the planes and edges of the three separate crown molding designs.

Problems and Solutions:

• Modeling: One of the largest issues was putting all of the assets together because the room consisted of unique models and textures. We had difficultly aligning them properly. For example, our team of four all modeled the staircase area and had to ensure everything lined up for the camera. We double-checked the alignment, and still missed a few spots, but we solved the largest inconsistencies before moving onto lighting.
• Maya to Unreal Transfer: We had to tweak the assets when transitioning the environment from software to software, such as ensuring the UV maps did not overlap. The team did a lot of back and forth when importing began because we did not account for certain issues beforehand. Through troubleshooting, the problems were addressed and the scene rendered nicely.

Initial cherub model had bad bad topology, so I had to find another to use.

Newer cherub model after I rigged and posed it.

Low-poly frontal version of the statue WIP.

Dynameshed side view of the statue WIP.

Part of the ceiling’s crown molding, utilizing NURBS curves.

A progress image of the staircase model.

Initial lighting of the scene when first importing textures.

Some of the imported textures breaking, which I went in to fix the material blueprint in Unreal.

All the textures connected right before baking the lighting in to the materials.