Introduction

Hello There! My name is Kahlil Reedy I attended Maine College of Art and got my BFA in New Media. After school, I had to decide how I was going to make a living so I moved to New York City and started out working as a graphic designer. After a few years, I realized design wasn’t my passion, so I taught myself how to model and texture in Maya. I got my foot in the door at a small indie studio named Kuma Games. For two years, I worked hard and further honed my skills and portfolio. I eventually landed a job as an Environment Artist out in Seattle and decided to move west to pursue my love of video games. My first position in Seattle was at a company called 5th Cell, where I worked on the game Hybrid. I learned a lot about XBLA games, the industry itself, and workflow best practices. From there I went on to work as a Senior Environment Artist at Monolith on the latest Shadow of War game. At Monolith, I had the privilege of working with some of the best artists in the industry, as well as contributing to some amazingly epic environments. I’m currently Lead Environment Artist at Hidden Path Entertainment working on Brass Tactics. I knew when Oculus came onto the scene I wanted to work in Virtual Reality. I have now worked in the industry for over 10 years. It’s been very exciting!

Farmhouse

The inspiration for the farmhouse scene was very personal for me. It’s a recreation of my childhood home back in Exeter, NH. The farmhouse has since been demolished. I knew I wanted to make this piece so that my family’s home could go on living in the digital world indefinitely. I recreated the scene almost entirely from memory. I did take some artistic license to get everything that was around the property into the final shot. I also took inspiration from the painter Andrew Wyeth, known best for his depiction of New England life. His sense of color and lighting helped me set the final aesthetic of the scene. I didn’t want this to feel like a photo realistic copy, too CG, or too rigid. Looking to more traditional art forms as well as working from memories is a great way to make work that feels real.

Production

The project started with gathering references and writing down all the specific elements I knew had to be in the scene. I work from largest to smallest. First I blocked out the layout of the farmhouse. Then I did a rough pass of prop and tree placement. Then I did a detail modeling pass to everything, modeling details like the shingles and siding. Next I started to get the lighting dialed in, time of day shadows angle and intensity. After that I did a simple material/texture pass. The small props were last to go in, the final bits of set dressing and adding that story telling element. Finally, came the post processing done in Photoshop and Lightroom. I chose to use Unreal Engine because I knew it would help me with the lighting. I did not want to mess around with Maya and Mental Ray. Being able to adjust lighting in real time made it quick for iteration. UE4 is also very artist friendly and it just works the way you expect it to. This is also where I leveraged my friend Rogelio Delgado‘s knowledge of UE4, I knew if I got stuck he could help me out. I had never had 100% control over a scene before and wanted to challenge myself to do it all.