Life on Mars?

This was my last assignment from art school at the Savannah College of Art & Design. The assignment was to concept and create a game envioronment from scratch using Unreal Engine and whatever 3D software we wanted. Then post it on The Rookies for peer review. I was fascinated with creating digital environments and characters. I modeled, textured, lit, rendered everything and also recorded an arrangement for the song that inspired the scene, Life on Mars? by David Bowie. I pulled out the ol’ 2012 MacBook Pro just so I could access Garage Band one more time.

Here’s the video walk-through I submitted for the assignment:

The idea

There is a really interesting dwelling built into a cave in Northwest Arkansas called the Beckham Creek lodge. I tried integrating cinematic sci-fi reference with this idea of embedding the hotel lobby into the side of a cave. I identified some of the modular components I would need to start building out and scaling up the scene.

The process

I modeled and unwrapped everything with the Maxon One suite, textured with Adobe Substance Painter and Designer, and rendered with Unreal Engine 5.3. Here’s a closer look at the hero asset.

Here’s an early process shot of the layout of my scene with most items UV’d. I went very low poly for the floors and walls, choosing to rely on textures to sell the detail. I used blueprints in Unreal to “clone” the wall and floor panels throughout the scene.

Speaking of walls, I used Substance Designer to create a texture for the rock wall. Ended up using World-Aligned textures via William Faucher’s Easy Mapper to project the texture onto the rock shape.

Here are a few frames I pulled from the finished product. I hope you enjoyed it and give the actual song from David Bowie a listen…it’s a goodie.

The Result

I loved this project, from creating the 3D art