It was very important to me to start blocking out the environment as early as possible inside the engine to get a good sense of scale from the start and to be able to further decide what other elements I would need for this environment to be more convincing. I had a rough idea of where I wanted my scene to go and decided to create a gritty, medieval environment which lead to this first layout of a city.
This would come in handy later because the whole scene was always going to be a lot bigger than anything I had ever done before and saving time wherever you can is very valuable. I used Maya to create the models and already had a modular approach in mind when creating my building blocks. I split the project into two major parts and started with the block out of the environment first. Because I was going to create a hand painted environment, a realistic and physically based rendering engine didn’t feel necessary for the project (yet). Unreal Engine 4 wasn’t as openly and freely available as it was today and I was very comfortable working with the old editor as I have been working on other world building projects before. When I started this project in early 2014, I decided to create a stylized environment inside the UDK. After having an intense look at their work (and others), I set up a few guidelines for the creation of my models and textures like blown up proportions and strong silhouettes while keeping the polycount low and painting the detail on the textures.
I am a big fan of the Blizzard style and used it as an inspiration for this environment. While a lot of games these days are trying to look as realistic as possible, there are still many games that use a more cartoony look to attract an audience. My teacher and supervisor (Neville Marcinkowski) gave me feedback on a weekly basis to ensure the project is heading in the right direction and can be realized on time.įor this project I wanted to explore and learn the ways of creating a stylized environment by using hand painted textures while broadening my range of skills with new techniques in model and texture creation. The whole project took me about eight months to finish and all the models, textures and world building was done by me alone. The following blog post will break down my workflow, the utilization of UE4 for this project and how I got to the final product, which I called “Riverfall”.