Andrey Chen — Technical Art · Lighting · VFX · 3D Art · Full portfolio in plain text · CV
Oracle
Environment & Lighting Artist
Oracle is a short, unreleased project developed in Unreal Engine, with art direction and concept art by Vincent Maccioli.
I assembled the scene in Unreal, created many of its environment assets, and set up its shaders and lighting. Most models used a high-poly-free workflow: low-poly meshes baked and textured directly, with normal-map detail added in Substance Painter.
What I did
- Constructed the scene in Unreal Engine and created many of the environment assets.
- Set up shaders and lighting, and optimized the scene.
- Modeled with a high-poly-free workflow, adding normal-map detail in Substance Painter.
- Engineered mobile-friendly shaders for the effects the Quest 2 couldn’t afford to render the usual way.
Oracle runs standalone on Meta Quest 2, a mobile chipset that has to render every frame twice, once per eye, at a high, steady refresh rate. That budget rules out the usual tools: real-time reflections, extra render passes, post-process effects and dense background geometry. So I had to find efficient solutions for the moments that mattered most: a possessed TV, windows onto a street that isn’t there, and a haunted mirror. Each one is faked inside a single material.
TV glitch static
One material instance on the TV screen, driven from Sequencer. Animated glitch textures layer static, tearing bands and color shifts, and a face bleeds through the noise as the signal is taken over, with no post-processing or video textures.
Window parallax & spooky mirror
I lit a blockout street in Unreal and captured it to a cubemap with a SceneCaptureCube, which Vincent Maccioli painted over. Interior mapping projects that cubemap onto a single flat plane, so the street shifts with the viewer and gains depth without any geometry; rain streaks, refraction and neon flicker are layered on top. The mirror uses the same trick: the girl is posed in her own scene and baked to a cubemap, so the mirror reflects a room that isn’t there without a real-time reflection.
Gameplay
A gameplay exploration in which the player takes on the role of an oracle and tries to predict the future by reading tarot cards.
Skills: Scene Construction, Shaders, Lighting, Optimization, Blender, Maya, Substance Painter