3D: Blizzard Student Art Contest Entry

It's about that time of year again-- whenever Winter Break rolls around, I get ready to flex my handpainting skills to prepare an entry for the Blizzard Student Art Contest. This one will be the last one I'll be able to enter, as I'm graduating in May, so I had thought I'd go out with a bang! I've always been fascinated with Titan architecture, so I figured I'd pay an homage to the Throne of Tides dungeon with a little shrine. I also love sharks, so fitting those in was also necessary! I did a bit of design work, studying rock formations and underwater plant life to inform my space.

Then I had to decide how to situate my shrine-- I was really taken with the lighting of underwater caves, and I wanted those sorts of glorious shining god rays that come with light refracting through water. I blocked everything out in Unreal Engine Four to get a good understanding of how to manage this lighting set-up.

And then to block everything out in Maya-- I used a technique where I baked down sculpts from zBrush and took their normal information to generate cavity and ambient occlusion maps as a base for my textures.

Then I threw it into UE4 to figure out what spaces needed to be filled.

UE4's material system, with its per-pixel lighting, isn't super conducive to a World of Warcraft style-- more often than not, the specular has to be tamped down a whole lot so the painted-on detail doesn't get blown out by the lighting. I still made a few roughness maps, especially on the gold and shark statue, to make sure I got that extra mile out of the lighting. I added the jellyfish almost as an afterthought to bring the eye back to the shrine-- looking back, though, they're my favourite bits I made for the scene.
But something still didn't feel quite right about the scene. Sure, I had everything I wanted built and in-place, but it felt confined, too dark. So I ran it past a bunch of people, and after a fantastic bout of feedback I changed the layout and got this:

Which felt so much more right-- it's a more open composition, it's much lighter, the eye has more space to roam, and the shapes of the shark statue read so much better when viewed from the side. It also let me practice my VFX with building the portal!
Here's a few of the textures I made for the scene:

As always, I had a great time working on this project-- I love any excuse to get in and try new techniques with my handpainting, and now that I'm more confident in using zBrush, adding that to my workflow really speeded everything up! I'm sad that I won't be able to enter any more times, but the three times that I've made an entry have been truly eductional and a blast. I've made a document to track my progress with this particular contest in mind, and I think the results speak for themselves!

Thanks for checking this post out-- here's a clownfish for your troubles!