Silent Bloom: Asset Creation

A collection of in-depth looks at the modeling and layout process I have been doing for Silent Bloom.

http://distinct.as

11/8/25

This week I have been working on creating a view of Chicago to be seen from out of Jo's window. To do this, I started with the Chicago asset that I downloaded from Turbosquid. I found a camera angle that I liked that shows a well-known Chicago landmark, and begun work on making the city look destroyed. I started with removing some towers to make the city silhouette feel more distinct. as well as booleaning out some of the buildings to make them feel decrepit. I then created interior scaffolding that the booleans would reveal. Finally, I added some bush and leaf photoscans to make the buildings feel overgrown.

Over winter break I will remodel this perspective of Chicago so that my team has a custom environment that is high-resolution. But for the sake of our animatic, this will do for now.

11/5/25

This week I have been working on more world building in the form of flyers and train tickets for the animatic. These are not as fleshed out as I would like but at least they will add more context for the viewer when they watch the animatic.

11/1/2025

This past week my group and I went to SCAD's LED Volume stage to test our environments on the stage. To our relief, all of our files preformed as planned; optimized and smoothly. Here is a selection of documentation photos I took while on set.

10/26/25

I have been doing more iterations on the Ivy spreading effect. The current setback is that trying to force a Metahuman into Blender isn't a 1 to 1 with how Unreal's setup works. However since this effect will be used on a real actor (or at least a photoscan of our real actor), I am not too pressed about the results. My goal for the next few weeks is to iron out the animation of the plants as well as making higher quality assets.

10/25/25

This weekend I have been working on the Ivy infection spread effect. I want to add more variations to the leaves as I find them all too uniform and similar. I also want to work with the speed of the simulation. But I figure for now this will at least be a start.

I used this tutorial to learn how to create this effect: https://youtu.be/VDKXSLDqlgg?si=ZFE1KgJPM6zN081R

10/23/25

Today I have been working on changing the Withered assets to work better with Ben's Unreal Engine materials. Until recently, I had been using physical geometry to create the boils on the Withered. However, Ben had requested that the boil geometry be removed so that he could use a high-resolution material instead to create the effect of infected skin.

I also think that in removing the boils, it makes the shape language of the withered look more recognizably human. Here is a before and after of one of the Withered poses:

10/18/25

During the weekend, I worked on creating assets for our church environment. My professor had been pushing for there to be a tic, or distraction happening in the background to add further discomfort to the final scenes of the film. I had the sudden inspiration that maybe an old fashioned antagonist like the one for our film might be the type to precure and use a record player. I decided to model an alter with a gramophone, with the idea that while the final dialogue is going on, the gramophone would be playing tunes that would echo creepily around the church. The final kicker in my mind is that the record on the turntable would keep skipping again and again to add tension and create a real sense of unease.

Here are the assets I was working on creating.

Making these changes to the church prop layout has really revealed that the lighting will have to be tweaked because currently the alter does not read as well as it could.

10/16/25

For the past few days, I have been working on a procedural method of showing the spread of the Ivy. Luckily, I was able to find a tutorial for Blender that showed me almost exactly how to make what I wanted! Now I have a LOT of stylizing and refinement to do, as well as making a procedural leaf spreading system to go on the end of the Ivy tendrils.

Here's the tutorial I used to get this base file going.

https://youtu.be/0LOaFbbTSZQ?si=VfbVENgFK6frSrWD

9/27/25

The Wall environment has been a lot more interesting to work on than I was thinking. Today I have been working on "apocalypsing" the existing wall shown in my last update.

For starters, I began working on background cards. I took an image of Chicago from the city's Wikipedia page and brought it into photoshop. I removed the background and started painting in vines and greenery all over the buildings.

Once this was done, I created a png card file with a few different vine formations.

With the vines done, I then started populating the 3D buildings with the vine cards as well as putting in the city skyline cards.

(Please note: The character is just a stand-in so I would know where the focal point would roughly be.)

I then experimented with how adding atmosphere and volumetrics will affect the scene. The results were convincing.

9/26/25

The past few days I have been working on upscaling the model for the Chicago wall. I had made a previous mockup version for early Chicago look-dev, which I will put below.

Since I want this section of wall environment to be high-resolution and clean, I deleted everything but one segment of wall and began to build up the scene around the wall.

I first added geometry to the already existing segment, putting bevels and higher detail where they were needed.

I also added higher resolution textures and building models that I created.

For the building models, I used image textures and built the geometry around the existing images. This is useful for me in that the models are incredibly lightweight because the textures carry a lot of implied detail .

9/25/25

This evening I was working on setting up a tileable section of national park that our train could coast through. I used the Blender landscape extension to create some basic mountain shapes and then populated them with a png-based tree made out of alpha cards so that the level would be relatively light weight. I also modeled a section of train bridge. I figured we probably won't ever see the tracks but that it would be better safe than sorry to have it made.

Once I had a section that I was liking, I started working on some early lighting tests for what our evening lighting could be.

(Please note that the train bridge does not have the finalized texture on it and the train car is just a stand-in asset.)

9/24/25

Today I have been working on the train station for the Albuquerque segment. My reference was the real Albuquerque Amtrak station.

For my purposes, I didn't want to create the entire station. I decided to just focus on the front façade as well as the arched sides. I also shortened the length and width of the station by about 2 arches. My reasoning being as viewers we will never be seeing the entire station so modeling more than needed would be unnecessary.

I used the bush assets from the San Felipe church file to populate the parking lot and sidewalks with a thick layer of brush and brambles.

9/23/25

Here is an update on the church file:

I ended up creating a PNG-based method for foliage to combat the geometry load. Since our project needs to be real time, I used a method of putting cards together to create a low-impact bush. I also wanted to use plants that could feasibly be growing in the New Mexico climate:

I then imported these low-poly bushes into the church file and began to populate:

9/17/25

This week, I have been working on modeling the location of the final showdown of our film. Silent Bloom has it's final act within a church, so I chose the San Felipe church in Albuquerque as the modeling and texturing reference. Here is the real-life church:

For my model, I started with blocking out the interior using custom props as well as some model stand-ins until I could create full customs for benches and painting:

The exterior received a similar treatment, I modeled out simple geometry and proceeded to make it more complex and add plant assets:

With the main parts blocked, I went back and started layering some basic materials as well as adding foliage to the interior of the church to match the world aesthetic.

9/14/25

This weekend, I have been working on asset creation of a passenger train as well as level layout for a few blocks of Chicago-themed city. All of the content shown is subject to change to best suit the stylistic choices and the engine limitations of Unreal Engine 5, but for the time being my tests will be in Blender.

For the train, I needed to model out a believable interior as well as a solid exterior. I compiled a reference list and built out a multilayered generic train car. Here is a breakdown of the different layers that show off the train car.

As I also said, I worked on level design for part of the overgrown Chicago sprawl for the train ride segments. Here is a compilation of me adding assets to build out from the test level I had created.