My group was tasked with creating assets for a 3d environment that we would render in Unreal. We had to choose from a list of themes, so we chose a science lab. Our idea for the science lab was more fantastical than grounded, so we took inspiration from various sources for the look of our lab, from artists like Tim Burton and films such as Frankenstein and Reanimator. We came up with ideas for what you would see in one and we split these items up into who will design and model these items. I was tasked with designing an eyeball, a spanner and posters.
Wrench
The process of the making of the wrench involved me placing down some simple primitives and deleting the faces from them to create the proper shapes for various parts of the wrench, such as the jaws. I extruded the front part back and then cut the faces off the top of them to make them flat. The next stage involved the handle, where I extruded the sides of a sphere and took off the top faces, where I placed the jaws. The teeth were simple square primitives. The shaft was also a square primitive. Finally, I made the screws by cutting a sphere in half and then placing it on another sphere that had both sides cut off.
Jar
These are some jars that I designed to add to the environment. I took a cylinder primitive and then deleted the faces on the top. I then extruded the edges backwards and then extruded them downwards so that they looked like thicker. I used a material that made the faces transparent to make the top part look like glass. I also used the same material to create the liquid inside the glass, which I also gave different colors for them to stand out from each other. The stand was created by taking a sphere and cutting off both sides and then extruding the bottom edge outwards, which made it look more stable. I was inspired by the look of the head jars from Futurama and I wanted to create a similar effect for them.
Eyes
I took a sphere and then I duplicated it and scaled it backwards to make it thinner to make the irises. I did the same for the pupils. I made 2 different versions of the eye, one has a smaller pupil and a bigger iris and the opposite for the other one. I gave them different colors from the other.
Syringe
Here is a simple syringe. I used simple primitives for it. I made the liquid inside the same way I did for the jar. I colored the needle part in substance to give it a rusted look to go along with the horror theme.
Head
This is a head for a zombie that I put in one of the glass jars. It was made of a number of simple primitives, which I then put into blender to sculpt it to give it more definition. This was also to give it a more refined art style. I imported the model into Substance Painter to give it color. The team recommended I use a plastic matte color tool. I made the head turquoise to give a more fantastical horror feel and a sickly look. This can also be seen through the veins I drew on the head. I also baked some subtle shadows onto the model using Substance.
I did retopology on the head. The retopology was actually pretty simple, but since the head would’ve been placed inside a jar, it wouldn’t be too noticeable.
Poster
To give the environment more personality, I designed a couple of posters to place onto the walls of the lab. I made them look like workplace safety instructional posters. Since the theme was sci-fi related, I based them off of sci-fi horror movies. The movies I homage were Alien, The Fly and From Beyond.
I used a UPA-inspired art style for the Alien and Fly posters.
After finishing all my assets, the group all shared their models with each other and we had to create a room with the assets we made.
I downloaded a few folders of the group’s and put all of the items in them in Unreal Engine 5 so I could create my own room.
The concept for my version of the room was Frankenstein-esqe with a machine located in the back of the room that creates these bizarre creatures made with mixed-up body parts. I was partially inspired by Bride of Reanimator in particular with the creature in the machine. I used both my own assets and one of my teammate’s to create the monster.
The assets I placed in the room would be things you would see in an evil scientist’s laboratory. The layout has the machine in the back of the room. Beside it are various screens that I planned to put gifs on screens and lighting illuminating from it. In front of the machine, there’s a operation chair with computers to the left of it and a barrel full of arms to the right. There is also a table with a bunch of items on it. One thing that I worry about the place of the assets is that the composition of the room would look too cluttered.
I included a lot of light sources that I placed inside several assets, such as the radioactive barrels and the light inside the machine. I gave each light a different color, such as a green light emitting from the toxic waste barrel or blue light emitting from loose electrical wires. I did these to give the environment atmosphere. An example I did of this is the red light eradiating from the machine with monster inside, as it’s the creature look more threatening. To improve the lighting in the environment, I turned the sky light in the lab to black, which caused the room to become near pitch black except for the added light sources illuminating a bright light in the environment. I also turned up the intensity of the lighting. The colorful lighting was partially inspired by the films of Dario Argento.
Around the machine, I placed a bunch of monitors that one of my team members had created that came with images that I could put on the screens, such as scientific papers and pages from the Necronomicon. I designed the machine to have monitors coming out of it, but the art that was made wouldn’t thematically make sense so I drew my own art for several of the monitors.
I had a monitor at the top of the machine, so I drew art that looked like a X-ray of the creature inside the machine and I had a monitor on the floor beside the machine that I made look like it was showing the creature’s brain.
I added a light source in front of the screens, so that they give a glow that you would see when a tv is turned on in a dark room.
Another way I showed off the lighting was through the use of textures, as instead of placing RGB into Ambient Exclusion, I instead in the material option menu, had R set to normal, G to roughness and B to metallic, which gave the textures a reflective sheen to them.
When I was creating the pathway for the camera to follow, there were a few frames that showed the movement of the camera moving from one location to another that came out very blurry. I removed most of them, but I keep 2, because I thought those frames looked appealing. I rendered an image sequence that I put into Premiere Pro to make a video. To go with the horror theme of the environment, I included a song from the soundtrack of the slasher movie Maniac in the video.
I had to remake the idea for my room a few times as I couldn’t get certain textures to work, but thankfully I learned to fix it and got to make the best version of the room. I believe the thematic elements and the world building elements seen in the environment show off what I wanted to do with the concept in a creative way, such as the bits and pieces of the creature spread around the chair and the arms in the barrel. Seeing the rooms of my teammates I was happy to see everyone using each others’ assets and seeing what they did with them. I also think that the look of our combined assets were aesthetically consistent, so nothing came off as off looking. I do think I could’ve added more of my own assets into the environment, but I didn’t have an idea on where to put them. The video I made showcasing the lab had camera movement and angles that I felt showed off the scale of the location. My worry about the composition becoming cluttered was rectified through the use of lighting and some item shifting. I am happy with how my room came out.
