Time For Tea
One of my favorite parts of waking up early in the morning is brewing my first cup of coffee. With this piece, I drew inspiration from this feeling of tranquility while maintaining the painterly aesthetic of the concept. All aspects of this project were created by me from scratch including models, textures, lighting, VFX, and post-processing.
My primary goal for this project was to create an environment that was visually appealing and performance-efficient. I achieved this by creating a series of 3 atlas and utilizing them to texture every asset in the scene. To avoid obvious repetitive tiling, I used 2 UV sets of additional noise coupled with decals to diversify surface details further.
I wanted to add more narrative to this piece so it was more human. I added aspects such as the teapot boiling over to convey a story that suggests the person living here is forgetful or in a rush to run to the grocery store.
Learning the basics of Unreal’s Niagara was needed to sell this piece's atmospheric feeling. While initially being a challenge, I was able to create the steam, wind, and dust particle systems utilizing Niagara.
Programs used: Maya, Zbrush, Substance Painter, Unreal Engine 5, Photoshop, Adobe Premier.
Concept by: Sh1m4da
Music by: AShamaluevMusic
Concept by: Sh1m4da
pROCESS
I began blocking out the space in Maya to get a sense of scale before importing it into Unreal. Once everything was fully modeled, I then began to camera match and pick out the parts that weren’t exactly working for the composition.
For texturing, I started with making a wood material and applying that to all of the major parts before moving on. This was to make sure the color and saturation were correct since most of the assets were wood. This took a bit of a back-and-forth, but I wanted to get that weathered look from the concept.
A struggle I had during this project was perfecting the lighting. Since this is an interior scene, I increased my indirect lighting value to soften shadows so there weren’t any hard edges. For the god-rays, I combined a cone mesh and a custom material in unreal that consisted of multiple panners and a depth fade with a fall-off in relation to other assets.