“NIGHTMARE AT PIKE PLACE” - Mentorship Project

See additional breakdown on ArtStation!

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.