“NIGHTMARE AT PIKE PLACE” - Mentorship Project

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This real-time game environment in Unreal Engine 5 was my capstone project for my Environments and Props for Games program at Think Tank Training Centre.

I completed it over the course of a one-on-one, four-month mentorship with Rhiannon Remo, Senior Environment Artist at SUCKER PUNCH PRODUCTIONS. You may know her work from PlayStation’s Ghost of Yōtei and God of War Ragnarök games. It was an opportunity as rare and rewarding as it sounds.

This scene is an original concept based on both a short story I wrote and photography of the real-world Pike Place Market in Seattle on Christmas morning by Chris Reedy. My goal was to take a real-world location I was intimately familiar with in real life, and transform it into a terrifying setting perfect for a AAA survival horror game.

All assets were modeled in Maya with select elements sculpted in ZBrush. The majority of the materials were created from scratch in Adobe Substance Designer, supplemented by customized smart materials created in Substance Painter. All buildings in the scene were created using a modular asset workflow.

The bricks you see in the scene were placed using a Bullet physics engine simulation in Maya. I created the tentacle material using a complex Unreal Engine 5 shader that used bump offset and subsurface scattering to give the impression of translucent, layered skin, with moving blood ventricles, and vertex animation to drive the tentacles’ wriggling.

Demo Reel

Tentacle material - created using SSS, bump offset, vertex animation

Creating brick destruction using Bullet physics engine in Maya

Nightmare at Pike Place - Substance Designer Materials

  • Brick Road

  • Chain-Link Fence

  • Donor Name Tile Floor

  • Ridged Ceiling Metal

  • Wall Stucco

“TINKERBEARD’S SECRET LAIR”

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I wanted to create a stylized, technicolor world that felt like the swashbuckling fantasies I loved as a kid, like those in The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker and The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn. Concept created by the unbelievably talented Ke You Ting.

This is a real-time scene running in Unreal Engine 5. All assets were modeled in Maya with select elements sculpted in ZBrush. The majority of the materials were created from scratch in Adobe Substance Designer, supplemented by customized smart materials created in Substance Painter.

To achieve the nuanced color variation seen in the concept, I used vertex blending to layer multiple hand-painted wood materials within a single shader directly inside Unreal.

To imbue the project with a flowing ocean breeze, I added vertex animation to many materials within the scene. There are ZERO blueprints driving the object animation in this scene aside from the standard world and lighting setup; all motion is achieved entirely within the material shaders!

Vertex Animation Demonstration

Sampling of materials created with Adobe Substance Designer

“THE SHRINE”

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Modeled primarily with Maya and rendered in V-Ray, with some supplemental aspects created in Blender. Textured using both Mari and Substance painter. Pyro and fog effects created using EmberGen.

Concept created by Albert Urmanov of BIOWARE. Thank you for allowing me to use this incredible work!

Thank you also to my Think Tank instructor Alex Corll, who advised me through this project.

“TOWER LOUNGE” (work-in-progress)

Created using Maya, Substance Painter, Substance Designer, and Unreal Engine 5. Many of the textures are still temp - including this here for resume purposes.

Concept created by Katrina Lin of NEXT LEVEL GAMES. I’ve been a fan of hers since my Nintendo days, so it was so exciting that she allowed me to work on one of her concepts.

I love the off-kilter architectural style of Katrina’s scenes, and my number one goal with this project was to capture all of those unique diagonal angles while still allowing the scene to make sense in real time.

Thank you also to my Think Tank instructor Saphir Vendroux (known for her work with ROCKSTAR GAMES), who is my hero.

An original hero prop design: a “snag machine” inspired by Pokémon Colosseum and XD, updated for the Switch 2 generation.

Hero Prop - More Details

Bonus: “THE LAST OF US - FIREFLIES BACKPACK”

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I incorporated a Last of Us / Naughty Dog / PlayStation theme into this assignment for Think Tank.

Modeled with Maya, textured with Mari and Substance Painter, lit and rendered with V-Ray for Maya and used Nuke and Photoshop for post-production.
Forest photogrammetry by ScanForge and PackDev on Fab.