Forgotten Memories

This project is my entry for Grads in Games SFAS 2024 Environment art challenge. I set myself 10 working days to complete this project, I submitted my original entry with 3 days of progress but continued to improve and refine my work. My primary objective for this project was to create a lightweight stylised playable game environment using my own unique concept ideas whilst showcasing a wide variety of technical skills. For this project I used Maya, Zbrush, Substance Painter, Substance Designer, Unreal Engine, Xnormal, Marmoset Toolbag and Photoshop. 

This is the list of objectives and skills I wanted to showcase and delve deeper into on this project are the following:

- RVTs

- Lighting

- Post-processing volume

- Water shaders & Techniques

- World-aligned textures/Materials

- World position offset

- Parallax occlusion mapping

- Vertex painting & Layer blending of complex materials

- Trim sheets & bespoke custom foliage

- Tree and foliage generation(Tree it+Speedtree)

- Landscape materials, sculpting and painting

- Volumetric effects

- Lightweight Niagara & particles

- Custom Designer Materials

- Versatile Decal Material & Texture

- Trim Sheets

- Modular Kits

- LOD

- Cloth simulation

- Environment based on my original concept

- Time taken: 10 working days 

Artstation - https://www.artstation.com/alexis_drawing

Once I had the skills I wanted to show, I started identifying the target audience, followed by creating a Miroboard where I put all my primary and technical references and moodboard.

I had an idea of how I wanted my environment to look like, but the issue was the layout as nothing made sense. I wanted the player to feel comfortable, not lost in the environment. I did a quick blockout on how I wanted things to be and then 3 variations. Once that was done I did iteration. This stage was quite interesting as I had to make sure things went together. Once this was over, I imported it into Unreal Engine and played around and saw how it would be if a player would play the game. After seeing how it looked in Unreal I decided to go back and work on the floor plan. That was the first thing I noticed that was wrong. If a player would go in the village would get lost, nothing would make sense, so I decided to work on it. I did a few more blocks in until I was satisfied with the results and played it again in Unreal.

I created the houses by using modular assets and for some of the assets I made prefabs to make my life a little bit easier.

The fun part was the technical side of the project. I created a water shader, day night cycle blueprint where the light turns on/off when the sun goes updown, different materials using lerps to add more variations to the houses, mesh painting, foliage and RVT.

Most of the materials were textured in Substance Painter, but I created some materials in Substance Designer to use in certain shaders.

Once I was done, I wanted to push the project further by creating different seasons. For each one I did some extra FX to match the season, such as snow for the winter season. 

After I finished everything, I could easily play around the environment in each season.