Galactic Adventure - Assets & Materials

Over the past few months, I've worked with a team of artists to create a space inspired experience using Unreal Engine.

Environment Artist: Kyle Smith (Myself)
VFX Artist: Dyllan Gillespy https://www.artstation.com/dyllan_gillespy
Lead/Producer: Daniel Gilbreath https://www.artstation.com/danielgilbreath

My responsibilities were to author all custom materials, planets, and unique assets to the scene.
Assets sculpted in Zbrush
UVs done in Maya
Baking maps using Substance Painter
Materials created using Substance Designer
Final renders taken in Unreal Engine & Marmoset Toolbag

Sculpting the asteroids was the longest process, taking feedback and applying it to ensure that every shape and form had a purpose. The sculpts were decimated to around 10k poly's to keep the silhouette and main forms intact. Studying different asteroid shapes, while taking some creative liberties helped achieve the final look.
The equirectangular projected materials use the polar to cartesian node to blend the north and south poles for a more seamless appearance. I used a custom mask node created by Matthias Schmidt to blur the harsh line given between the transforms and finalize the blend. A lot of the height and noise generation was shared across all materials to speed up production and get base forms laid out. I used a free, open-source cloud image added into the base color and also to mask out any underlying height/normal information.

Work created for Dog Cat Bear Production LLC

Check out the rest of our team's work,
Cheers!