Han Yue
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My name is Han Yue. I am an environment and game assets designer.
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My Journey
Everyone's life is a unique RPG game (but without paladins to revive us!). Every choice we make permanently shapes us. And once the choice is made, we must commit to it. Becoming an environment artist is one of the best choices I've made. With the skills I've learned, I am creating not just my own future but helping to draw in some magic and joy into those of others.
My love to the game can attribute to my love to the painting which can date back to my early childhood’s doodling. When I was a little boy, my early perceiving to the nature drove me to draw colorful dots, lines, shapes, which came together to from all kinds of fish swimming around the mountain and horses flying in the sky. It was a very wonderful and fruitful time, and some of doodling even won me Chinese national and international awards.
I like traveling, and like to see the nature beauty and learn different cultures and history. I often wonder how I can bring those thrilled snow peaks in Himalayas, those saltine crystals in the Death Valley, those Three Kindom battles in ancient China to others. It is the game which brings the works of nature and history so striking that they seemed more illusion than real. Games are special to me because they allow us to expand our lives to other worlds; in these other worlds, we gain a “bigger than life” stage to show our personalities, to really be ourselves.
For the past three and half years, I have been pursuing “Game Art and Design” at the Art Institute of California, Los Angeles. I am proud of myself for being a top student in my class; many of my works are displayed by teachers as examples. I have been learning the art of world buildingfrom building 3d models, to animating those models, to designing entire environments. I have been captivated by the goal of making my worlds achieve the realism of photographs. My main tool has been Unreal Engine 4 and I have thoroughly studied its martial system and blue print. For realism, I can create higher poly objects with multiple maps generated from both Xnormal and Quixel. To simulate dynamic objects, I can create a morphing (via a Morpher modifier plug-in in 3D max) which interpolates between various states of the object. A question that I always keep in mind is how to make players believe that everything is alive and happening in real time. For example, how does one reproduce the effect of a cloth waving in the wind? 3Dmax allows me to paint weight onto cloth, representing the effect of wind striking a particular area.
Part of the fun of being an environment artist is figuring out how to achieve a particular effect as efficiently and elegantly as possible. Consider the problem of displaying an object with an uneven surface, e.g., a brick. Usually, the artist needs to sculpt an extremely high poly model and use third party software to project it on low poly models. This is a time intensive process. Here is an alternative method I figured out using the software Quixel. First I draw the height maps in black or white using Photoshop, then generate them in Quixel and convert them to normal maps. Finally, I can supplement the normal maps with metalness and metalness maps based off of physically correct materials. The end result is a brick approaching the realism of the traditional method but requiring much less time to make.
Although I love playing games, I love making games even more. I want to create worlds which combine the immersive qualities of virtual reality with the realism and detail available from Unreal Engine 4, to make a world where players forget about the “real” world.
My love to the game can attribute to my love to the painting which can date back to my early childhood’s doodling. When I was a little boy, my early perceiving to the nature drove me to draw colorful dots, lines, shapes, which came together to from all kinds of fish swimming around the mountain and horses flying in the sky. It was a very wonderful and fruitful time, and some of doodling even won me Chinese national and international awards.
I like traveling, and like to see the nature beauty and learn different cultures and history. I often wonder how I can bring those thrilled snow peaks in Himalayas, those saltine crystals in the Death Valley, those Three Kindom battles in ancient China to others. It is the game which brings the works of nature and history so striking that they seemed more illusion than real. Games are special to me because they allow us to expand our lives to other worlds; in these other worlds, we gain a “bigger than life” stage to show our personalities, to really be ourselves.
For the past three and half years, I have been pursuing “Game Art and Design” at the Art Institute of California, Los Angeles. I am proud of myself for being a top student in my class; many of my works are displayed by teachers as examples. I have been learning the art of world buildingfrom building 3d models, to animating those models, to designing entire environments. I have been captivated by the goal of making my worlds achieve the realism of photographs. My main tool has been Unreal Engine 4 and I have thoroughly studied its martial system and blue print. For realism, I can create higher poly objects with multiple maps generated from both Xnormal and Quixel. To simulate dynamic objects, I can create a morphing (via a Morpher modifier plug-in in 3D max) which interpolates between various states of the object. A question that I always keep in mind is how to make players believe that everything is alive and happening in real time. For example, how does one reproduce the effect of a cloth waving in the wind? 3Dmax allows me to paint weight onto cloth, representing the effect of wind striking a particular area.
Part of the fun of being an environment artist is figuring out how to achieve a particular effect as efficiently and elegantly as possible. Consider the problem of displaying an object with an uneven surface, e.g., a brick. Usually, the artist needs to sculpt an extremely high poly model and use third party software to project it on low poly models. This is a time intensive process. Here is an alternative method I figured out using the software Quixel. First I draw the height maps in black or white using Photoshop, then generate them in Quixel and convert them to normal maps. Finally, I can supplement the normal maps with metalness and metalness maps based off of physically correct materials. The end result is a brick approaching the realism of the traditional method but requiring much less time to make.
Although I love playing games, I love making games even more. I want to create worlds which combine the immersive qualities of virtual reality with the realism and detail available from Unreal Engine 4, to make a world where players forget about the “real” world.
