Cullen's Brewery

Rising Star 2020 Environment Art

The World

Abandoned and left to rust and rot, Cullen's Brewery. Once a busy industrial site out in the Montana wilderness, now empty and being reclaimed by nature. Rusting cars, peeling paint and boarded up windows, but the beer's good.

Inspiration

This piece was inspired by games I've played in the past year, including Fallout, Farcry 5 and Tom Clancy's The Division 2. All of these games achieve a sense of beauty and tranquillity in relativity chaotic surroundings. Nature's re growth over human structures and intense environmental story telling. This was my main focus of this project, to convey a story and a feeling of it being a part of a larger open world, not just an isolated student project.

Foliage and Nature

This is also the first time I tried realistic foliage, which was a learning  curve. Editing normals, implementing the foliage into engine and making it look  generally natural. Speaking of natural, that was my biggest challenge in this project. Making the world look natural, so stuff like piling up bin bags along walls in a way that looks real and makes sense, having foliage encroach on things that make sense, placing props in a way that look like they belong and are part of the world and haven't been dragged out of an editor into the scene.

Originality

I wanted to be creative and original with my idea so avoided the tropes that most environment artists fall into of doing something that has been done a million times before. Branding the world and adding character is a way I did this. I lit the scene in both day and night, as both a demonstration of skill and having interesting variation in my beauty shots.

Reflection

I'm incredibly happy with the finished product as this has been a project in which I have been pushing myself out of my comfort zone on almost every front. From modelling foliage and Vehicles to being less dependent on texturing software like Substance Designer and using Photoshop more.