Industry Work — Robyn Simone Mund

Brandstar Studios - May, 2023 - Present

Role: VIRTUAL PRODUCTIONS INTERN (vad dEPARTMENT)

For demo purposes only

The Beach - Sunrise, Sunset, Night time

An Unreal Engine environment Study

Created in Unreal Engine, assets modularly put together from Quixel and Unreal Engine Marketplace

Lighting, layout, and environment design created by Robyn Mund

Optimized for Unreal Engine, rendered via Unreal Engine camera sequencer

Inspiration from pwnisher on Youtube

A coworker challenged me to create a photorealistic environment from scratch, whether that was utilizing assets we already had in our library or creating things from scratch. They also told me that this industry, Virtual Productions, is a fast paced, always moving industry and if I wanted to create this, I had to work fast.

I did start off with deciding that I wanted to main hero piece, which was the bridge. I ended up scraping that idea because I know that I would try my best to make it perfect and spend most of my time creating the bridge rather than focusing on the whole scene at a whole, so I made the decision to try to find modular pieces I could put together to create a bridge that I had in mind.

I will say, I am quite used to the pipeline of creating everything myself and passing it onto another artist to put it together in an environment or even vice versa, so this was a challenge for me to begin with since I was taking assets that were pre-made, optimized for Unreal Engine, and creating art from them.

This environment took me about a week, with some challenges of the water utilizing Fluid Flux (which I something I have never used before), figuring out the sequencer for the Sunrise to Night time sequencer, and making it look as realistic as possible with lights, the shoreline, where the boats and lighthouse should sit, how bright I wanted the sun and moon, reflections, and overall just seeing the project through.

I was able to take critique of even the smallest changes that would make the biggest of deals in making this environment flow better and look for pleasing to the eye. I was able to actually put this on our 12k LED wall and see it in full motion. I was able to then make changes that would best fit our wall and took away some nice advice to make it even better for the next time I have to create an environment from the ground up.

I did make a Linkedin post about this Beach Scene and see other people appreciate the work that I put in to make this scene come to life. I am glad I saw it through, see it come to full fruition, and the rewarding experience that I got from just simply completely this environment all on my lonesome. I learned a lot and even though this is not the first environment that I have put together, I would say that this is the first environment that I have put together where you can physically see all my new and old skills come together and show improvement.

Welcome to our Treehouse!

Treehouse modeled in Autodesk Maya, Textured in Substance Painter, Lighting and Renders by Robyn Mund

Environment and Layout created by Cathleen Mahoney utilizing Foliage from Unreal Marketplace

Optimized for Unreal Engine, rendered via Unreal Engine camera sequencer

During our time here, learning Unreal Engine, expanding our knowledge on environment design, building and optimizing environments for a 12k LED wall, we decided in the last month of our internship that we wanted to create a capstone project that would capitalize on the skills that we have expanded on and new skills that we learned whilst being under the VAD Department. We aimed for creating something that we were proud of and that we could show off to not only our studio and department but something that we can continuously talk about and learn from.

We decided to pitch our idea to our team that included our mentors and our supervisors on building this environment. We created an entire PowerPoint Presentation and everything. We spoke about how we were going to tackle it, our timeline from start to finish, and the applications we were going to utilize to get this to a place we wanted it to be. Cathleen and I gathered references and resources to showcase and then we closed our presentation with how it was going to benefit the studio and us as artists.

Our team was intrigued, asking us very honest questions on what we were looking for when we accomplish this project, how we were going to start it, offering us feedback on our ideas, and overall trusting us with completing something under stress. We originally gave ourselves two weeks to complete it, but our supervisor wanted to challenge us a bit and gave us five whole days. That included handling any issues that would arise, building assets from the ground up, changing our ideas, changing our scope, figuring out lighting, tree placements, and anything else that would possible cause a positive or negative reaction.

From the time we started, we probably changed our scope about three to four times, utilized different references that we did not pitch, deviated from our original path, scaled down our idea to something more feasible for us to complete in five days, and overall we just wanted to complete the dang thing.

Cathleen was “fighting” foliage, as she described. Dealing with issues in tree placements and overall engine optimization so we were able to comfortably move around without the project lagging, which was extremely difficult for her. Figuring out the sun and lighting, our sky, filling in empty spaces, working with the model I gave her and overall “fighting” the engine. She utilized foliage from Unreal Marketplace and pre-existing foliage packs our studio had at our disposal and ultimately created an amazing environment, in the time we had, for our little treehouse that eventually turned into a tree-mansion, but I will touch on that a bit later.

I fought with Autodesk Maya, losing and accidentally corrupting my file which held me back a day or two, UV’ing the assets that I had built, trying to create something realistic for the first time (which was nerve-wracking), texturing, adding on small details even after we had settled with our initial build and overall just trying to make it work with the environment that Cathleen had built.

We had originally pitched that we would create something versatile, i.e. an inside environment and an outside environment but unfortunately we only were able to tick one of those boxes which was focusing on the outside. I did manage to add an inside, with inside assets, but it was not usable for our wall, unfortunately. We could not fit our nDisplay inside the treehouse (a treehut at this point), so we just could not show that part of the project off. We did get it on the wall, we were insanely proud, but our supervisor, Kalhil, mentioned later on after he saw it, that we deviated too far from the pitch we originally presented and he was right. He gave us another three days to take his critique and make it what we promised him. And so, we did. We expanded the treehouse to fit a nDisplay inside the tree-mansion, we dressed it with pre-existing furniture packs we had in our library, I fixed the original lighting away from Ultimate Dynamic Sky to just using the lighting that Unreal Engine had in their engine already, Cathleen optimized the environment and learned how to make the trees less heavy on our project and ultimately created something we were beyond proud of even more than the first time we put it on the wall.

I grew from this experience (and I am sure Cathleen did, too although I cannot speak for her). From communicating and working with someone that I had not worked with before, learning how to choose my word more precise and taking fault where fault was due, admitting where and what went wrong, together and individually, and owning up to mistakes and to successes alongside my co-worker-intern, and whole-heartedly just taking responsibility when being called out and having more patience with myself and my new found friend.

The both of us learned a lot, grew a lot, and completed our goal: to make something we were proud of. We filmed a little Behind-the-Scenes for the studio where we were interviewed about the project, our process, and the end result of the environment which I will hopefully share soon. Overall, I would call this one a win and a giant success for the both of us.

To many more treehouses and unlimited growth!

Moment - june, 2022 - january, 2023
ROLE: JUNIOR 3D ENVIRONMENT ARTIST

For demo purposes only

Lights, Street Lamps, Lanterns
Modeled in Autodesk Maya, Textured in Substance Painter, Rendered in Marmoset Toolbag 3
Poly Count dictated by Total Tris