Sinner's Destination Environment

Sinner's Destination

Hello there! I am Melvin! Studying at the Universe Of the Arts Utrecht (HKU) I focused myself on Game Environment Art & Tech Art as building worlds and make them come to life is my favorite thing to do.

I have challenged myself to work outside of my comfort zone in multiple ways.

For this project, I wanted to create a fully walkable lineair level for Unreal engine 4, but taking a theme I have never done before : An underworld/hell themed environment. My main inspiration for this project was DOOM 2016 and the God Of War games as they have a few levels that represent underworld/hell type of locations.

As my focus is being an environment artist/tech artist in this project, the research has been focused on what feelings, emotions and general experience the chosen inspirational games gave me in those particular levels. I also researched a little bit of real life Runes, as I noticed DOOM 2016 has some sort of demon language in the game. I will follow up to this later.

While sketching and designing the level, I came across some iterations after blocking out the entire environment. A large part felt rather too straight while playtesting along with the fact that the original plans asked for a lot of custom assets.

To make sure how I am going to build the assets and the environment, it needed a benchmark asset. Starting a lowpoly in Maya, going to Zbrush and remembering all the specific brushes I used to define artstyle. After that it goes to Substance Painter where I save every new material I create for specific functions. For the benchmark asset for example : Stone, Metal, Bone and Dust strokes.

I had to make a very important decision and learn something new and fast : find some ways to make a lot of the environment in a low amount of time.  I got the quick idea of building a few sets of rocks, which have a different profile on each side and using pixel offset in Unreal 4 Engine, being able to blend in eachother to make even more rocks. This gave me a lego playset for every rock-type of entity in the game environment.

I pushed that idea even further when doing the baseblocks for any exterior structure block I could think of. Make a set of blocks, different sides..and give them 3 types of texture sets. They're the foundation of the entire temple.

A temple of suffering cannot be complete without skulls. Skulls are important. No explaination needed.

The building parts are also a seperate package of different assets that can snap together.

The demon is pretty friendly.

The milestone so far

The runes were pretty fun to design.

The Future

In the future I will be finishing every aspect of my milestone first, then continue on the doing interior parts and go to the landmark at the end of the game I have yet to fully design. 

I hope you had a lot of fun watching my work!

Cheers

Melvin