Fusion!

For Drawing Fundamentals we were to create environment thumbnails by mooshing together a number of internet pictures then painting over them.

Top image is the mash up of pictures and below are my paint overs. Some images were harder to work with than others, such as the skull mountain one. The end result ended up being surprisingly pleasant though despite the struggle I had with it (really, all I could see before was palm trees and color blends). Meanwhile the industrial, destruction ones proved to be difficult because they all felt like one and the same. And the mountain one was just boring all around.

If I had more time I'd love to push a few of them further, but the clock is ticking and there's still much to do.

All Hail the Glow Cloud

For my assignment due Wednesday we had to make dynamic material instances in Unreal Engine. So I made a treasure chest glow. First bit is if you approach within its trigger box. The second super bright glow is triggered by pressing the g key on the keyboard.

...Maybe I should make videos of things, that's a cool way to navigate my environments.

Zip Zap Zop

Not really much to this daily update other than showing off a material project. We were tasked with going into Unreal Engine and messing with the node structure of the materials to see the results.

These were the Starfish Nick originally had. I just wanted to stack them for reference.

I forget exactly, but I believe these two were just me playing with the sliders on Nick's materials to make a slimy starfish and a dried up yellow one.

...Apparently I forgot to take screens of the three I did. Oh well. I played around with the textures to make three more starfish with my own experimental nodes. Mostly in the timing of the electric pulses on their backs.

Then cannon textures. The back three were my attempt to make them see through. Oh and the one does a blue pulse cuz I took the timing stuff from Nick's starfish and played around with them on the cannon.

Learned about texture material node working, but there's not too much to really show.

Let it Burn

After our group effort in creating an environment, we had an assignment to go back to our previous solo one and revamp the lighting system.

...for once my light abuse was actually a good thing. Or at least I think it was a good thing. Lighting in Unreal Engine is a lot different from Maya. I'm honestly baffled by how POWERFUL Unreal is. I can throw plants and lights at it and it takes them like a champ.

But that's besides the point. I revisited the Cathedral of the Damned and went to work lighting up the whole place, creating a fog, and setting the mood.

...the end result was apparently hell

Just in time for Halloween when I made it!

I purposely wanted to light up the Pagan Goddess statue since it's a central focal point. Also I wanted to make sure any possible players would see the chests located at the base. Lighting is real good for bringing attention to areas.

The Cathedral looks so eerie with the lights now

Back to our familiar broken wall exit I placed.

And out we go. Really the lights and fog made the back of the Cathedral much more terrifying than it was. You can now actually see all the skeletal remains everywhere. Not to mention the glowing hell fire walls.

I really like that skeleton.

Fun story about this particular shot is that the area jump scared me twice. See, in the center pillar there's a flag and it just so happens to be capable of movement in the breeze. Continuously, I would forget that piece was there while lighting up graves. As a result I'd suddenly see something moving in an area where things shouldn't be moving and instantly assumed that this movement was towards me. Which...would give me a scare. Really it was quite silly since I wasn't even in 'player mode' like the screens I'm showing off. Also I placed that flag there in the first place knowing that it could move in the breeze. Seriously very silly.

Here we are exploring the final shots of the place

I used up quite a number of lights, but the effect was neat and it really looks a lot better than the mood I had originally.

That's it for this update. I'll see what I post tomorrow~

This was a Triumph

Hello, hello! Long time no update. As our third round of games descended upon us, I found myself the only artist with a mighty asset list that needed most of my attention. Before I knew it, I'd gone weeks without a word ...which also meant weeks of information to post to this blog. Considering how much we covered, this was a very intimidating task. I'll be breaking this up to prevent one very large post with far too much content.

First most significant thing was a teamwork task of creating an environment in unreal engine. One person would create the landscape, another person would populate the landscape, and a third person would create the skydome for the landscape.

KC was in charge of creating the landscape and chose a volcanic theme. All the lava, rock, dirt, hills, mountains, and valleys were placed around by her.

Dave was in charge of creating our skydome. Unfortunately I think he accidentally got stuck with the hardest part of the project. It came out great though.

Finally, I was in charge of populating the environment with the assets provided which included an amazing collection of rocks...and grass.

It was a pretty huge environment. 

So like my evil Cathedral, I took the time to make various points of interest on the map. I'll try to give a tour best I can.

Here's where you start off on the map. There's about 3 different ways to go from here, so I'll just focus on the one leading up the lava area for now.

I treated the whole level like the lava was an obstacle to avoid, so there are rock bridges placed throughout for the user to get across.

I also used rocks as a climbing tool. Jump from rock to rock to get to the top of that hill!

                                      

For here, I wasn't sure what to really do so I tried to make a path of rocks that you can run through. It's kinda entertaining and visually breaks things up.

From here I simply placed random things. Mostly rocks in the lava and huge rocks to keep a player from falling off the level or getting stuck in the terrain.

Also lookit dat skydome.

Returning back to our original spawn point, this is what you see if you head the exact opposite direction of the lava. There's a rock bridge, and across from that is a small flower patch. Follow the burnt trail and you find...this silly little hideaway. It's a rather dorky point of interest but I figure if people are going this way I might as well end it with something. So crawl on in, jump around the rocks. Random rock hut?

Probably my favorite point of interest is the flower altar. There's two ways to get to it, which is either through a rock pass in the first image or a different direction of the player spawn point.

Here

I really like the flower altar. I accidentally thought of it in my sleep because I was building environments in my dream that night. So thank you random dream for giving me a great idea.

For all the lava I tried to make it's origin point have rocks around it so it seemed like it was coming from there.

From the flower altar there was one more hill in the center of the map that I put rocks around so players could scale it if they wanted to. Sadly it doesn't lead anywhere too fascinating. Although it does give a good view of the rest of the map.

The lava 'sparkles' were pretty. Also I had one last rock climb just in case players jumped off that high point.

That pretty much concludes this massive map. I was only allowed rocks and grass for environmental assets and I think I did an alright job making something a little entertaining with that limitation.

Next post, we'll revisit the Cathedral again. Because apparently FIEA can't keep me away from flaming landscapes.