This portal video was the showcase piece for the TEDx event and it's purpose was to provide an in-between visual for the talks. Due to our event containing 7 speakers, it was imperative that this 3D environment held a high-fidelity standard.
It was created in Unreal Engine 5 using various Megascan assets, the hero-prop (Pyramid) created in Zbrush, and a range of shader workflows to enable techniques like optimised fog and fake portal depth.
Image #1
Image #3
Image #1 showcases an initial rough blockout concept after being provided a brief for the showcase portal environment. The final video render, while drastically different in fidelity, still contains the original DNA of the blockout concept.
Images #2, #3, and #4 showcase UE shader graph workflows for materials such as the portal depth offset (#2), the Z-offset/WPO terrain blend (#3) and the cloud card shader setup (#4).
Image #2
Image #4
Image #5
Alongside the portal showcase environment, I was given the responsibility to create a jungle environment which complimented an ayahuasca-focused talk and its shamanistic roots in the Amazon jungle (#5) as well as an animated 3D logo splash page (#6). The splash page was completely created in Maya.
The jungle environment followed a similar workflow to the showcase desert environment, though due to this being loaded and played in real-time with nDisplay, an optimisation pass was necessary which was dutifully aided by the team at target3D whom we worked closely with.
Image #7 depicts a water shader I created, similarly to all my shaders across these projects, it has a range of parameters to control attributes such as texture UV tiling, normal map intensity, depth tint (specific to water), roughness, etc.
My approach to these shaders, knowing I would be creating multiple environments in a month, was to be as efficient as possible which meant creating modular systems that could be quickly iterated upon depending on their use cases and producer feedback.
Image #7
Image #6