A Desolate Temple

This week, I began the environment by thinking about what the layout should be for this environment and ultimately, coming out with a greybox blockout, ready for the art.

This began with the sketch of a birds eye layout. The goal was to have a seamless walkthrough of the environment from a campsite, to the entrance of the temple to ultimately showcase the beauty of this alien world.

As soon as I finished the layout sketch, I then opened up UE4 and started to build the blockout of the environment, starting with basic BSP brushes to sketch out the general layout of the landscape. I then jumped into Maya and modelled really basic meshes to represent art assets that would be used within the environment (trees, rocks etc.)

During this process, I needed to figure out what the colour scheme was going to be like so I look through my inspiration and ultimately found that the jungle colours were very reminiscent to Planet Earth and I wanted to be sure that this world was not ours, but has familiar elements to us humans. So I dug through and ultimately got inspired by the vibrant colours found in No Man's Sky and Survival Mars, so I gravitated towards a more pastel colour scheme.

Happy with the look of the colour scheme and basic lighting, I began to play test to ensure that the environment works as a level without the player jumping out of bounds and falling as well as not getting to places where they really shouldn't be.

When reading the brief of this contest, I immediately thought about the travellers of the script discovering a landmark within this alien world. So while I looked through different ideas, I came across this concept art from ArtHouse Labs:

This allowed to start crafting a moodboard of ideas thinking about the concept about the alien temple within the jungles of this world. Something monolithian, but eerily something that is recognisable. This would make this world more of a scarier place than before because what if they had been understanding human civilisation for a long time and we didn't know it.

I came across some concept art that included some art for Prometheus by David Levy and Khang Le that matched what I wanted to go for in this scene:

Once I had solidified the idea and imagery down of this temple, I went to have a look at some concept art for jungle ruins that would tie the landmark together with the environment around it so that it did not feel empty as well as matching the brief of a wonderous area that evokes the curiousity of a player (if it was an actual video game environment).

Once I was happy with the collection of the concept art I had gathered, I needed to then figure out the layout of this scene and organise the project so that I can keep on top of the tasks I would need to do to finish the environment before the 15th of May.