Welcome to APOGEA
A growing world far from Earth
What is APOGEA?
APOGEA is a world that I created to hone my skills in 3D art. Initially concepted from a programming perspective, I will now use it to build up my experience in all facets of game design.
Beginning as an idea in the Spring of 2024, I will begin to bring the world to life with many different projects culminating in a final playable game.
A digital city in a far away land.
Initial city render, August 2024
Summer 2024
Some secondary assets are from Quixel Bridge
Project Overview
For the summer of 2024, I had the pleasure of participating in the University of Delaware’s Summer Scholars program. The program paired me with a professor who guided my project and helped me develop my skills in the area.
I took the opportunity to learn about 3D Environment Art, shape language, modular building methods, texture authoring, and to brush up on new programs.
In this project I used Unreal Engine for rendering, Blender for modeling, and Substance Painter for texturing.
I also used SpeedTree and Substance Designer, but they were not significant parts of my workflow.
Video Flythrough
This is the final render for the Summer Scholars 2024 showcase.
Modular Kits:
Procedural Generation:
How I used code to optimize my workflow:
One of the main goals in my project was to dip my toes into procedural generation, as to begin to ask the question:
“Where in my workflow can I optimize a task with code?”
I began to utilize this with spline instancing. While a basic tool, it helped me quickly place assets down in my environment, saving me hours of work.
In these screenshots, the street lights and the road lines were procedurally placed and instanced on instances of a single spline blueprint.
I tried to make each tool as customizable as possible. Each tool I imagined that I was making it for an imaginary artist. I asked myself:
“What would this artist need? What would they want to customize? What cool feature could I add to make their life easier?”
This led me to add parameters, randomization, and customization tools within the spline tool.
The spline tool has two modes: Decal and Mesh. In mesh mode, the object instances a single static mesh. In decal mode, the spline instances an array of different decals in the same direction. You can customize the scale, rotation, and spacing of the instances, as well as add a randomizer with clamp values to add variety.
Material Pipeline
Setting up materials takes forever. In Blender, you need to individually code a new material each time you want to add one to an object. In Unreal, the task is simplified with inheritance and material instancing.
My professor stressed that I used master materials to reduce the computation load on my computer. This method proved more than effective, allowing my computer to render the world in real time at ~90fps.
So, using switch parameters in Unreal’s material editor, I create a versatile material that hosts all of the parameters for the materials I needed in the scene.
