George Cutler: How I created ‘Mushroom Truck’ using Unreal Engine

How did the project start?

It started as a four-week Narrative Brief to produce a 3D scene that utilised environmental storytelling based on two words of our choice. I knew I wanted to communicate a world that harmonised rustic machinery and visual elements of plants in a fantasy setting. After exploring different themes and ideas in a word bank, I settled on “industrial adaptation” – excited for its narrative potential. 

What inspired your work?

What initially inspired the project was my fascination with the feelings evoked from seeing a local pizza van lit up in the cold evening walks back from uni, which inspired me to create a similar atmosphere but in a different world. I wanted to establish a solid style and aesthetic that consisted of eye-catching surface materials that complemented the lighting, composition and rendering in the software of Unreal Engine 4. I was also inspired by the prop ‘Emil’s Shop‘, which drives around in the game Nier: Automata, which was a significant inspiration to the truck prop itself.

“My fascination with the feelings evoked from seeing a local pizza van lit up in the cold evening walks back from uni inspired me to create a similar atmosphere but in a different world.”

What challenges did you face?

One of the biggest challenges was working with the lighting in UE4. The most crits I received were the lighting and how it communicates the wrong time of day. I was faced with the challenge of darkening the lighting around the vehicle as it’s the focal point without obscuring any effort into detail I put in the surrounding environment.

It was also tough to balance quantity and quality as the project included many individual components. The first outcome sadly lacked one of the main narrative selling points — the mushrooms the truck sells! Unsatisfied with my submission and having more I wanted to explore, I took this as an opportunity to revisit this established concept, reinforcing the narrative I envisioned whilst also learning about lighting, environments, foliage, and animations in UE4. 

How did you move your idea on?

Using the non-destructive workflow of Substance Designer, I decided to produce a library of “materials” that would be used as confident brush strokes to establish a solid art direction. I discovered that adding colour variation to grey metals pushed the materials towards a grungier tone, and embraced this stylistic change for the revisited project by using painterly textures on the surface materials inspired by the paint strokes present in Arcane. 

I also experimented with composition and lighting in UE4 as well to help see the prop within the world it belongs to.

“I took this as an opportunity to revisit this established concept, reinforcing the narrative I envisioned whilst also learning about lighting, environments, foliage and animations in UE4.”

Tell us about your final outcome.

Revisiting the original project has been incredibly rewarding in boosting my software knowledge and confidence as a 3D artist. It was fun to produce the gloomy autumnal atmosphere that mixes fantasy elements of the mushrooms and mechanical aspects of the truck. Overall, the main driving force of the project was the excitement of learning new techniques, establishing a small pocket of a world and concluding an unfinished project.

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You can follow George’s progress on his other projects by visiting his social channels:

Instagram: @designed.by.george

Artstation: georgec7