The Rookies 2022 Entry

The Rookies Entry 2022

Hello! My name is Jakob Andkjær Poulsgærd, I'm 23 y.o, I'm an environment art intern at IO Interactive, and this is my Rookies entry. My main entry this year will be a project I've spend two and a half months making - 5 weeks of that time being pre-production - for my final exam at 3D College Denmark. 

Ejnoy!

The Mill

For my exam at 3D College Denmark I decided to make an interactive visual story driven game as a vertical slice/proof of concept. We were given 5 weeks of pre-production and 4 weeks of full production time. All work made during the pre-production would not count towards the final grade and would not be judged as part of the full project, however it was allowed to make general R&D and make templates/setups to speed up the workflow during the full production time.

The idea behind the project was to create a game without a direct narrative. The story would slowly be uncovered by the player through sheer exploration and environmental art, interacting with a few assets to find out more about what is happening in the world. My goal was to create all my assets from scratch, but due to a sharp deadline I had to resort to quixel for my foliage assets. The rest it made by myself.

This is the final product, showcasing me walking through the game.

I used wombo.art to figure out what direction I wanted the project in, and ended up with some generated concepts that I really liked, and thought had an interesting composition.

I started out blocking my level based on my generated concepts and slowly replacing my whiteboxing with greyboxing assets, which I had imported through datasmith, making it easy to update all my geometry with a few clicks

The whole level is made up from this kit

Here's the final shots

To optimize my time as best I could, I utilized the ultimate trim technique a lot for all of the wood and metal parts. I then used vertex painting to blend between 2 variations to add more variety and make it less noticeable that it's mostly reuse.

My texture work is almost all done in Substance Painter, with very few exceptions where I use Designer. In Substance Painter I like to work very procedual when making textures, for assets or tileables it doesn't matter, I like having control over my work. I use an anchorpoint workflow I've been developing slowly, where all my layers are connected and are reacting to each other, like in Designer. One might ask why not just use Designer for that stuff, and it's simply because I'm more fluent in Painter, and because it's possible.

Here's  a small progress gif showcasing how I build up the texture for my cobblestone

For performance and visuals sake I then made it a parallax mapping shader, as to not have dense geometry or flat texturing

If you want to try out the game for yourself I uploaded it to my google drive. Feel free to get it and try it out for yourself. It's pretty heavy performance wise, as the focus for the exam was visuals and not performance, so it's recommended to have a RTX 3070 or above. Enjoy :)

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1wpjTlWlOZnS_NDLRt8HCKF2TnBOdpeA5?usp=sharing

Bonus:

As a small bonus, we also had to choose a concept and make an asset in 24 hours (3 work days consisting of 8 hours a day), and make a turntable and small breakdown with UV's and wireframe. I chose this fun car concept made by Anna Sumina (https://www.artstation.com/artwork/2q5zDx). It's rigged and game optimized

Thanks for looking! I hope you enjoyed :)