This project was made long before I entered Coatsink (before any profesional experience) and thus is unoptimized and very amateur in a lot of areas, especially shaders and programming. Coming out of the Ubisoft Tech Test I did I wanted to expand more the things I already did for them and started working on this project.

Even with all of this said, I find this project to be really important because it demonstrates my quick learning abilities and flexibility as a Technical Artist

Original Description

This project uses all of the shaders I did for tech art tests in interviews and all of my current knowledge of VFX creation using Houdini.

I wanted to do a bigger project that put to use all of my advancements in VFX and shader programming and that used programs that I don’t usually work with in my workflow like 3ds Max.

GitHub Repo Link

Render

Final Render using Unity 2021 (URP) + Unity Recorder

Windmill Modelling

This time I decided to model in 3ds Max, not Blender. I used the cloth modifier for the windmill blades. UV’s were made in 3ds Max but packed using Blender.

Windmill Texturing

VFX (Houdini)

Splash Mist

For the mist particles I decided to do a Flip fluid using the animated wheel as a collider, then mesh was exported as an Alembic file to Blender and rendered with motion blur using Cycles.

Splash Particles

Creation process of the contact splash particle using Houdini. Using a flip fluid initialized with a sphere, by assigning random velocity vectors to the generated points using Curl Noise I created a splash animation, this was also exported as an Alembic file to Blender and rendered using Cycles. The rendered frames were composed as a flipbook and then used in a particle system in Unity.

Environment Creation

Procedural Terrain using Houdini

The terrain was created using Houdini’s terrain heightmap tools. Why? I just wanted to try them and see what they were capable of. The different splat maps masks were created inside Houdini along with the river mesh.

Procedural Grass using Blender’s Geometry Nodes

I created the grass for the project using Geometry Nodes, back then they were still in their infancy, but suited me well for the task at hand.

Procedural Trees using Speed Tree

Speedtree is a fantastic program that integrates extremely well with Unity. I created them using the software because of the Auto LOD’s and Impostor creation + easy integration with the terrain system already present in the engine.

Scene Dressing