The farmhouse bakery
This is a self indulgent personal project I made after moving to Utah. I was really inspired by all the small farms and colorful changes of season, and I had been getting back into baking too!
programs used:
wireframe
uv sets
Split into 3 UV sets to maximize resolution as the house takes up so much screenspace.
There are many overlapping UVs placed with the textures I planned in mind.
hero prop: bakery cart
Textures on the baked goods are completely handpainted, utilizing height painting to create a split crust look.
main props
These props support the architecture of the scene!
All animation was done completely through simple UE5 blueprints.
supporting props
These props were used for additional set dressing and adding a more lived-in feel to the environment.
forest assets
Foliage made by hand in Maya and Unreal Material Editor, Rock made through sculpting in Zbrush and baking down.
Wildflowers
Flowers were made with a custom painted texture map that was applied in Maya to easily lay out UVs and mesh.
Technical art
This was my first time rigging and animating. I have been wanting to learn rigging for a while, and this was a great opportunity to. It definitely took a lot of trial and error and has lots of room for improvement, but I think having an animated creature really brought the final scene to life and it was well worth it.
chicken rig
Chicken modeled in Maya and weight painted and rigged in Blender. Rig has some basic IK controls.
If I do another bird, I'll make the base model have folded wings...
textures
Feather texture drawn in Photoshop, then put into Designer to create a base material. Extra details, shading, and configuring of the feather cards were done in Painter.
animations
Kept the idle animation that plays in the foreground subtle, and exaggerated the others that are only seen from far away.
Pond assets
Made with Material Driven Vertex Animation.
Lilypad Parameters
This material drives the movement of the lilypads, rotating and moving them back and forth with per instance randomness to make them look natural.
Fish Parameters
The fish motion is driven through a sine wave smoothly pushing its vertices, allowing procedural motion without any skeletal mesh.
2D smoke vfx
The chimney smoke was created with a flipbook plugged into a billboard that always faces the camera. Animating 2D vfx is also a first for me, but I really like the effect it adds to the scene!