LEVEL 2

This is the result of a four week project, designed to practice environment art and Unreal Engine implementation. To take this from concept art to a playable level, a lot of hours were spent tweaking post-processing parameters, as well as putting together finicky materials to make it look like my intended view.

I call the project "Level 2", as it is intended to be an early stage in a game. Not the first, but a simple one to guide the player while they're still learning the controls. My inspirations consists of 3D Nintendo titles, both early and modern. Bright colors, simple assets and a fun vibe!

The concept art was made in Photoshop, with a vision of focusing on clear silhouettes and big blocks of color to give off a playful nature. I wanted to have a limited number of assets to work with, to replicate the feeling of making actual stages where the assets are reused a lot.

I began with making block-outs to get the general feeling of scale and placement. During this stage I also began thinking about the camera placements. While this project is meant to be seen from the view of a player, I also wanted to have a few pretty angles.

Then I moved on to making the final models. I made highpoly models in Nomad Sculpt, which I then used as a base to make the lowpoly. No normal maps were used in this projects to save time and texture space. This didn't matter too much as I wanted to keep my surfaces simple.

Below are three dioramas that focuses on the different assets and their final colors. The small islands also showcases the type of material I had for the ground. By painting RGB channels, I could achieve a drawn look while still having textures of the correct size. This, of course, saved me from having gigantic textures.

A good chunk of my time during these weeks were spent in Unreal, making sure that the lighting and other effects looked good. It was important that it only enhanced the assets, and didn't hide anything. I wanted the shadows to be colorful and the sky to be an unnatural blue, increasing the contrast and making everything pop!