Name: Kieran Burke
P Number: P13188055
Email: p13188055@myemail.dmu.ac.uk
Project Title: GP Environment Realistic Brief 'New York Rooftop'
Overview
The final project that I decided to take from the style matrix was the realistic environment. Out of all the environment projects I believe this to be the most challenging. A new 3rd person run & gun action game is being planned. One of the levels in the game takes place on the rooftop of a New York City building. The aim of this project was to produce this game level. With regards to the limitations, anything was doable so long as it emulated a realist New York rooftop. A tri limit of 50000 and 4x2048 texture sheets have also been given.
Research and Design
As I start any project I went through the stage of concepting my ideas before starting the modelling stage. Understanding how much work I am able to accomplish in 3 weeks I decided at the very start that I wouldn’t spend too long on this stage. A nice coincidence was that the brief actually outlines that this stage shouldn’t take longer than a day to complete. The concepting stage for me consists of putting together moodboards, finding a series of reference images and also modelling a simple white box that I can then paint over. Having seen what other students produced for this project I wanted to produce something a little different while still following the main outlines of the brief. I knew early on that I wanted to have a real feel of verticality in my level, the reasoning behind a multi-tier environment. Another aspect that went into the layout of the rooftop was story. I wanted my level to be interesting, to tell a story as the player traverses the rooftops. For my fmp I wanted to play around with foliage. Again, I used this project to test the waters.
Once I settled on a strong enough design I began modelling the several dozen assets that I would use to populate the game space. Similar to the last project I used my already gathered reference images to model the props I needed. For some of the items I had to model them purely out of my own creation. As a change from my already established workflow, I began importing my assets into engine relatively early to get a better understanding of scale. A lot of this stage also consisted of a lot of resizing and adjustments as I continuously changed the scale of my level.
Finally, the polish of the level and assets. Having produced a large number of assets, I went with the programme substance designer to texture. This sped up my workflow considerably. Learning this programme during my first project was a great help for this one.
RENDERS
Textures
with the 4x2048 texture sheets, i decide to split them up into 16x1024 inclusing unique texture sheets and a few tilable textures as asked for in the brief.
assets 1
assets 2
assets 3
assets 4
assets 5
background buildings
building walls
dirty roof (tilable)
door
foliage
moss (tilable)
decals
ground (tilable)
brick (tilable)
carpet (tilable)
stairs
Below are some screenshots taken in-engine. they show the exterior rooftops and the interior offices.
For what I wanted to accomplish for this project, I thought it was quite a success. I knew early on that I wanted to have a real feel of verticality, the reasoning behind a multi-tier environment. Another aspect that went into the layout of the rooftop was story. I wanted my level to be interesting, to tell a story as the player traverses the rooftops. Similar to the last two projects, I gave myself this brief to better my understanding on what I could accomplish during my fmp. Again, I used this project to test the waters.
At the end of the day, everything that I do before fmp is to pick up new skills and master skills I already have. Sure there may have been things that I could have done differently, but in terms of my overall outcome the atmosphere that I wanted was achieved.
Conclusion
