The Hobbit Hole

Behold! Here is my real time environment created with Unreal Engine 5, based on the hobbit houses from the Lord of the Rings and Hobbit movies. The environment captures the essence of J.R.R. Tolkien's iconic exterior hobbit holes, offering a glimpse into the cozy, homely world of hobbits.

This project was a challenging and fruitful experience that allowed me to develop a variety of new skills and deepen my understanding of technical shaders that bolstered the project immensely. These materials provided an excellent opportunity to experiment with spline blueprints, speed up my workflow using material functions, parameters and get more acquainted with industry related techniques.

The biggest takeaway from this project:

I created an auto-landscape material which can be used for:

- Tiling variation for macro, micro detail and tri-planar projection.
- Can utilise multiple landscape layers for manual painting across the landscape. Has the ability to swap out textures with ease.
- Slope detection for blending snow with rocks and other terrain usage, like grass, gravel, concrete etc.

Using Gaea was a plus because I was able to create, tweak terrains on the fly and see changes instantly, which was huge plus. It's super intuitive and feesible to get something up and running fast.

80% of my assets were sculpted in Zbrush and retopologised in Maya. The assets utilised the high and low poly baking process and were all strictly following the same texture map size of 2048 by 2048 2K resolutions. All the foliage used for this project were done using Quixel Megascan atlas's and the cards were developed in Maya. The environment videos were done using Unreal Engine Sequencer and edited in Adobe Premier pro. Renditions and final compositions were done in Photoshop. Thanks for viewing.