I designed Paradice Casino to be my last environment for my graduation demo reel, the entire casino floor is based on Valoro Casino, Timisoara, Romania. I was originally planning to re-use 3d models I had made for an earlier casino environment a few years ago but in the end I decided that I wanted to match the reference photos as close as possible and so decided to ditch the older 3d models and make everything from scratch.

It was an enjoyable project to work on, especially since I had to learn Unreal Engine 4 as I went along, but with my previous experience with UDK I was able to pick it up quickly. All of the texture work is also my own, creating the floor, carpet and wall patterns to match the reference photos was probably the most challenging part for me since I hadn't done something like that before, below are some of the images detailing my process to creating those replica tilable textures. This was also my first time getting my hands dirty with Physical Based Rendering (PBR) and the result speaks for itself.

I had about 8 weeks to bring this environment from reference photos to completion and in the end I was very pleased with the outcome.

This environment was mine and another environment artist's entry into Allegorithmic's 'the THRONE ROOM' competition hosted by Polycount. We both wanted to tackle something nearly completely organic so this was a great opportunity to experiment with new design tools and workflows.

> This is our progress thread on Polycount.

Our inital concept evolved a lot over the process into what you see below.

This environment was loosely inspired by a digital painting called observation deck by Zane Bien. I took a look at the piece and imagined what the environment could look like outside of what is shown, I began piecing together a space station corridor and docking port terminal around it. Some other inspiration for this environment comes from games such as Mass Effect, Deadspace and Deus Ex.

For the project I'd modeled a little over 80 props. 3/4's of the assets are using the same three textures maps I put together thanks to the help of www.gametextures.com. Everything shown here was modeled in 3ds Max and is running within the UDK game engine.

For my holographic interfaces I based my initial material layouts off of this and reworked it to get the desired effect for my environment.

America's Diner, When I began designing this environment, trying to settle on a style and decorm that would look interesting and have some character, I decided to try and capture a stereotypical 50's/60's American diner no longer in its prime, unkept and decaying, almost post-apocalyptical but with some small signs off life inside.