Recluse Garden - Level Art and Lightning - 2023

A few people are still living deep down in the Structure, surviving in a lost paradise. Sun is an unknown concept since long in this world, but with help of artificial lights from above, lamps gathered all around, culture is possible here as it's one of the rare place where water and plants can be found...
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This is a scene made to try UE5's new features and to evaluate and improve my skills on Environment Art and Lighting using modern techno, something my portfolio was missing.
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Inspirations are Tsutomu Nihei (yep, not very surprising from me!), Jeunet & Caro's movies, Bioshock and works published by talented artists here on ArtStation.
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It was made within 3 weeks (approximately 12-14 full days of work I would say).
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The goal was to work on level composition and lighting, so except a few custom shaders, models and Blueprint tools, almost all assets (3d models and textures) come from Megascans and Epic's game store.
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I'm using an outdated machine (i7-4790, 32g, gtx970) so I didn't recorded video of real time captures... It's running surprisingly "fine" (20-25fps) as long as Lumen and Virtual Shadow Maps are OFF, but when turned ON, it obviously drops very low (8/10 fps), so it wasn't optimal working conditions. I also turned off Nanite and preferred moderately detailed assets for performance reason. I'm pretty sure it would run super nicely on a less antique computer! It even would be possible to rise up a lot the models quality and detail objects density, as well as adding more FX...
Even so, I'm quite happy with the result and hope it will please your eyes.