GAME 3001 Submissions
Ewan Couper
P1219306x
Behind the Gate Project
"Behind The Gate" is a partially stylised envrionment brief and my final brief from the style matrix as part of GAME 3001. The aim was to create a small environment up to a budget of 80K tris with 2 2K textures. Working from my own idea my intial goal was to emulate the style of Ralph McQuarrie predominately but I also used a number of other inspirations to help fuel the art direction for the project. During the project I worked on concepting, asset creation, lighting and post processing in Unreal.
Pre-production
Researching for this project I initially focued on the artwork of Ralph McQuarrie but as I wanted to develop my own style for the project rather then poorly try to emulate an exsiting own I quickly widened my reference pool. As my idea was to create a small zen-esque garden i also researched into wood block printing with the hope of creating a painterly style in engine.
Knowing that colour would also be a major player in the succes of my environemnt I was keen early on to establish a colour palette to work from in a similar fashion to painting. I looked into flether clolour control and limiting the colour palette as explained in james Gurney's Colour and Light. I was keen on pushing the contrats between warm and cold with a very warm central point such as a flame which existed in a cold icy environment such as a mountaintop. This theme of contrast also played into the shape design of the environment with the majority of forms withing the garden space beign circular in nature with the goal of empahsising the angular central pillar.
With this in mind I kept to a limit number of assets and began to concept the more major elements in the space such as the rocks and the central brazier. I also began to blockout the space in Unreal to get a better sense of the scale of the environment and what i would need to produce, again i stayed very limited with the size and number of asset I needed to produce keeping it to an absolute minimum to further my design. From the intial blockout I worked on some very rough thumbs to better get an idea of what the final environemnt would look like.
Production
Asset Creation
Due to the simplistic nature of the art direction modelling and texture creation has been a fairly quick and iterative process through the project's development. For me the focus wasn't on asset creation as with other projects I undertook rather i wanted to use the brief as a platform to exrcise my overall design skills, colour, form language, lighting and atmosphere which aren't skills, especially the later two, that I've had that many opportunties to exercise on the last two briefs. From the feedback i recieved the focus on art direction was definitly the key to the succes of the project, the execution of the colour palette and image composition so through-out the three weeks the modelling and texturing has generally taken a back seat utilising cheap and dirty modelling, unwrapping and to an extend texturing.
Brazier
The brazier is designed to be the hero asset of the scene, the contrast in shapes, lighting and colour as well as it's central position in the graden cement this. The model comes in at 1.9K faces and utilises six texture maps, two 1K, two 32x2048 and two 512 albedo maps. The copper material is tileable at 512 but the other maps are unque assets specifically for the model.
Rocks
In the scene there are two catagories of rocks, basic ones that are littered through out the scene and focal ones that are more visually interesting and share the common shape language used across the whole space from the pillar to the windows. in total the rocks come to under 4.5K and use two unqiue 1024 textures.
The Rest of the Garden
Within the rest of the garden there isn't that many other assets. The wall consists of a door and window piece and at each meeting point there is a fountain piece repeated at six intervals. These fountains again repeat the circular motiff of the level and are also apart of the six segmented glyph that spreads through out the environment. This was a key part of the environment I wanted to see through to the final production, the idea of a glyph extending from the central pillar all the way to the exterior walls. the garden's elevatiuon changes are all goverened by this glyph and again this pushes the circular motiff of the environment. texture wise these assets exclusivly use tileables.
Lighting and Atmosphere
Mid way through the second week I had all my major assets in engine with a first pass, I took a render of the envrionment into Photoshop and produced the painter below. The painting is a more refined version of the early thumbs and acted as an anchor for the project's direction during the second half of the project's duration. I also used the painting as my reference for creating the post processing in engine trying to capture the deep purples and blues found in the shadows in the painting. I found this to be a tricky translation having to apply overall filters in photoshop and losing the ability to mask out areas or boost colours or saturation in certain areas. In the end I feel that by using a mixture of lighting and post effects in Unreal I've been able to capture atleats some of the colour and mood in the paintover.
While working on the lighting I created a key point light to act as the central flame of the brazier which had three smaller, less saturated and intense lights in the focal rocks, these four acted as the primary light sources in the environment. They are also the source of warmth in the scene contrasting with the light violet fill light coming from a skylight in the scene, this combined with a purplish tint to the shadows would help to boost the contrast within the garden.
With the strong Orange/Purple feel of the environment it's been a pojnt for me early on and one that's been raised multiple times in discussions with tutors that a strong accent colour would really help to juice the level. For me I was always certain this would come through in the brazier symbols and the borealis. The former cements the idea of the brazier being the central feature if it's literal central position wasn't ham fisting this message enough and the Northern Lights help to adds this colour across the envrionment although with the movemnt of the lights it doesn't saturate the envrionment with cyan too much.
Submission Outcome
This project is my first venture into the creation of stylised environments and while I had a clear goal when I began to work on the brief it is perhaps the project that I had the most uncertaintity over the outcome. Taking on the lessons from the rooftop I went into this with a very strict scale to work in, sticking to the one major asset and emphasis on repeating assets and a simple art style. I felt McQuarrie offered the best platform to take inspiration from and try to emulate although as i said I didn't want to stricly produce a Ralph McQuarrie envrionment however having said that I do feel it was a mistake to not work from an existing concept. While I don't feel that pursuing my own idea and style hurt the outcome of the project I do feel that as an exercise of stylisation it may have been more beneficial to take an existing concept and work from there.
As I said I don't beleive that it was ultimately a huge negative to work on my own idea as throughout I've recieved a lot of positive feedback regarding my direction over the project. It's allowed me to excerise my knowledge of colour, lighting and atmosphere and practically applying these from Photoshop into Unreal which has been the biggest challange for this project. Overall though the project has gone rather smoothly, almost worryingly so, it's come in pretty much on time and just under budget. There are a couple spots of potential polish, working into the rock textures, breaking up the wall texture but the major thing that's bugging me and most people is the quality of the Borealis. It's in the ball park, that is that it works, but it needs an up rezzed texture and more geometry, the latter I've got the room to do but with textures it's gonna be tight I might see if I have enough geo budget to trade for a little more texture space.
