Alan Franco Díaz

All projects

Suspenseful Room Environment

A suspense-filled room built to master lighting in Unreal Engine.

Role
Environment art and lighting
Tools
Blender, Substance, Unreal Engine
Year
2024
  • Unreal Engine
  • Blender
  • Substance
  • Lighting
  • Environment art
  • Suspense
Dim room with a metal bed, a dresser with an old TV glowing green, a paneled door, a desk and a window with blinds, lit by wall sconces and a cold blue light

Overview

A 3D environment built to explore suspense: an eerie, mysterious room where light and shadow do most of the storytelling.

I have been focusing on lighting techniques, and this project helped me feel much more comfortable with them. I modeled everything in Blender, textured it in Substance, and then integrated, lit and rendered the scene in Unreal Engine, which was key to reaching the realism and immersion I was after.

The room is lit by a few wall sconces, a cold blue glow from the window and the green light of an old TV. A metal bed, a desk with a typewriter, radio equipment and scattered, partly redacted documents tell a story without any character in the scene.

Horror and suspense are a recurring interest of mine, and this room was a way to go deeper into how a scene can build tension through lighting, composition and atmosphere.

What I did

  • Modeled the room and its props in Blender.
  • Textured the assets in Substance.
  • Integrated everything in Unreal Engine and built the lighting to create an eerie, mysterious mood.
  • Dressed the room with storytelling props: radio and recording equipment, a typewriter, an old TV, scattered documents and cardboard boxes.
  • Built the mood with a cold blue and green palette, using the wall sconces and the window as the main light sources.
  • Rendered the final images in Unreal Engine, plus clay renders to show the modeling and the lighting separately.
  • Used the project to practice and refine lighting techniques.
View from the bed toward the door, with an old TV glowing green on a dresser, papers scattered on the wooden floor and cardboard boxes
Wide view toward the door, with papers scattered on the floor.
Front view of the door with an old TV glowing green on a dresser, wall sconces on both sides and open boxes on the floor
Front view of the door and the glowing TV.
View toward the desk and the window with blinds, radio equipment on the right and papers on the floor
The desk, the window and the radio equipment.
Out-of-focus view across the room with a document with redacted lines in the foreground
Depth of field: a redacted document in the foreground and the room out of focus.
Low-angle view of two wooden chairs, a desk, a column and a wall sconce lighting the corner of the ceiling
Low-angle view of the chairs and the column, lit by a wall sconce.
Clay render of the room, without textures, with green and blue lighting
Clay render: wide view of the room.
Clay render of the bed, the dresser with the TV and the door, with green and blue lighting
Clay render: bed, dresser and door.
Clay render of the desk, the window and the radio equipment, with green and blue lighting
Clay render: desk, window and radio equipment.