Dentist office case study
This was a project I had started in 2025 and brought it into 2026 to continue reworking.
My original inspiration was to create a CS2 style dentist office. I love how mundane the map locations can be, especially with the office map. I wanted to challenge myself to create a believable dentist office because of all of the different surfaces (and because I love teeth health.)
It started in Maya, with a a block out of the general shapes and going further into depth with the important props like the chairs. While modeling the scene, I paid close attention to the scale and details to increase believability. With the completion of the initial modeling, I added in some fun stuff to give the office some character. I even made a cute inspirational poster for the wall (in Photoshop not ai).
At first, I added some simple materials inside Adobe Substance painter and baked some higher poly meshes that I had sculpted in Zbrush. I was very happy with how this turned out and brought it into Unreal to add some simple animation to bring it to life. This was the first time I implemented animation in Unreal, and I found it to be very fun and reusable by creating a blueprint that changes a material's WPO (world position offset.)
Later, I decided to revise the scene by authoring unique materials in Adobe Substance Designer. This was so fun to learn about. Adobe Substance Designer is visually similar to Unreal Engine with the blueprints, however, it is much different in practice.
Once I created and applied these new unique materials for my scene, I decided to now push it in the other direction by experimenting inside Unreal with their Niagara System.
Inside Unreal, I created game states on a sliding scale from 0 to 1. This method makes it a near seamless blend for user triggered events. I created a tank in the dentist office that when knocked over started spewing a smoke particle. Once the user triggered this, the 0 state (normal office), it started to blend into the 1 state which was a hallucinogenic candy land state. These triggered different Niagara Systems that were