AUTUMN ESTATES
Environment Study and Recreation
This project was an absolute joy to work on! As part of building my demo reel, I chose to recreate the Autumn Estates area of the Olympus Map from Apex Legends. It was a challenge filled with everything from adjusting foliage normal and glancing angles, to refining and painting hard surface props, to blueprinting water caustics and transparency! It was a wonderful challenge that exercised both my technical abilities and artistic abilities.
For references, I relied heavily on the images used in Richard Rude's post on ArtStation, as well as some videos posted on YouTube. When the Olympus map was reintroduced back into the cycle for Season 12, I was able to drop in and take more in game screenshots of Autumn Estates for more accurate reference.
Process
To get started, I knew that I needed to get the two apartment buildings correct to scale as well as proportion, else everything was going to be thrown off. I make many iterations and tested the bevel on the corners of the building many times to ensure I had the right degree.
I exported the Unreal Engine Manikin mesh and imported it into my scene as a reference for scale.
Smaller Blockouts
After the buildings were blocked out, I started working on the smaller details: pillars, columns, fencing, stairs, doors, and the tiles that make up the patio landings. This is also when I started working on my hero prop, the supply crate.
Foliage
I created the foliage from scratch. The trees, potted plant leaves, and vines I painted in Procreate, then placed the texture as alpha cards. I kept the grass simple and created small blades in Maya - in Unreal Engine I added colour variation with a lerp and added a simple grass wind.
The trees took a little more work - I referenced Ben Cloward's tutorials and added clipping at glancing angles, sway to the leaves and trunk, ambient occlusion that started from the centre of the tree, colour variation in the subsurface blending, and corrected the normals.
Shaders
As work moved from Maya to Unreal Engine, I started to work on shaders for water and the custom tiling behind the "Autumn Estates" signage.
The triangle tiles I made using Substance Designer. I used a polygon 2 node and added definition to the edges of the tiles. I then created masks that isolated a few random triangles and raised the height. I took the same masks and added colour to the raised tiles and background tiles. Brining the texture into Unreal Engine, I simply added a Texture Coordinate node so I could control the scale of the texture.
For the water shader, I use a panner node with a normal texture 3 times and layered them. I kept the movement slow as the area of water was not a large body. I also used the camera position and world position to calculate the depth of the water from the camera's point of view. On top of the water, I added a caustics shader to give the water more dimension and texture.
Finishing Everything Up
As I continued to work on assets, I added them gradually to my scene, and began to place the foliage, dirt decals, and props. After 5 weeks, the final product was complete! The main goal was to complete the inner estate area, but since I had the assets modularly made, I filled out the surrounding apartments to add depth to my renders.
Takeaways and Going Further
This project for me really solidified my passion for environment modelling. I loved the challenge of taking on a large piece and executing it from start to finish on my own. Areas that I would like to work on are lighting - perhaps taking on the challenge of trying to light this as a night scene. What would Autumn Estates look like at night? Or perhaps in a different season?
My foliage has improved greatly since I first started modelling, but I know I can take it further. I am looking forward to playing around more with the Unreal Engine shaders and material blueprints.