I took a few week break from tirelessly applying to jobs I haven’t heard back from, to instead teach myself Unreal Engine 4, because it was not taught to us in University.
I took an official Lynda certification course on the Unreal 4 fundamentals, but I knew I needed to show off my newly learned skills with something tangible. I wanted to design and build an environment from scratch because a lot of entry level positions are junior level artists or designers. I figured this project would be a great way to tackle design, art, and Unreal in one swing.
In the end, I really think I hit a home run, but I wanted to document my few week process to give curious folks a glimpse at my process.
To start off, I’m a huge fan of horror, and I’m a big fan of horror games. The atmosphere you can create in a 3D environment is just astounding. When brainstorming my subject material for my environment, I had huge over scoped plans.
Pasted below are some layout sketches and brainstorming ideas I had. I initially wanted to make an Evil Dead inspired cabin in the woods by a lake. Kind of like a culmination of a few of my favorite 80s horror franchises. Then I wanted to let the player walk into the cabin, and go to the basement, stumbling upon a cult ritual room.
The cult basement scene quickly became my favorite portion of this over scoped design, and was heavily inspired by the cult cosmic horror film, The Void, and the indie FPS, Dusk.
My plans quickly changed though. At this point in my development experience, I knew this huge project would take way too long, as I have to start paying back loans by December, and II desperately need employment now. So with that, I knew I could only afford 2-3 weeks on this project, and I still had little hands on experience with Unnreal.
So with that, I down scoped to the basement portion. I made a layout and a list of assets I needed, and I quickly got to work.
I scratch built every single model in Maya, exported them as OBJ, UVed them in UV Layout Pro, and then imported them back into Maya to be exported as an FBX with proper export settings. Everything is in scale with a 6 foot tall human. I even concepted my monsters to get a better idea of what I wanted in 3D space.
As far as texturing, sculpting, and painting goes, I went with a mix of Photoshop, Mudbox and Zbrush.
I wanted to use Zbrush extensively for this project, but I was also new to that program, and it was taking longer than desired to get the results I needed. Instead I used a majority of Photoshop and Mudbox. I found out that Photoshop has an option to create normal maps, so I used that extensively for my material sets.
I actually created a handful of my own materials and textures from reference images in my own basement. I also want to give a shout out to CGI-Textures.com for a full catalog of free and fair use textures for you to use. You get a 15 credit download limit per day, and each texture is usually a credit or 2. It helped me get a lot of harder to reference materials I needed. Like if you need textures for a 3D indie title or say a testing a pre-alpha/first playable build, I’d totally recommend getting some textures and materials from them. They saved me a lot of time and stress with this project.
I slowly took a week getting all of my texturing done, and then came the task of getting it all into Unreal. I am used to a Unity work environment, but Unreal was admittedly very friendly to Unity people. Lots of similar procedures and layouts, sans a few key things. First, the Unreal material editor is very powerful, and took me a day to get used to everything it could do, including making decals.
Secondly, the lighting is just so much better out of the box than Unity. It is so hard to escape that “Unity” look for 3D titles, butt holy shit, Unreal is gorgeous. The post processing stack that is default in Unreal is really powerful as well.
Honestly, I enjoy both engines, but Unreal definitely lets users create much better worlds in a shorter period of time. The Friday the 13th Game is in Unreal, and it is just phenomenal looking, despite it’s bugs.
So below is a few of my finalized real time renders. I’m still exploring material settings and even more particle systems, but this project was meant to show I can design, build, and develop in the Unreal environment. It is also important to point out that these models DO NOT have LODs. They are just a single hard model optimized for game centric use.
Is this the end all be all sexiness of 2018? No, but I am happy with the results for getting my sea legs in this engine. It was a pleasure to work in, and I hope to be back in it soon! Fingers crossed this project lands me something cool. I really need it. Now I’m off to continue my boat racing game for android!
Edit 10/15/2018: I’d like to thank my colleagues Cam and Scott over at New Bloods for providing me with some constructive feedback, and for improving my lighting set-up. I was not properly building my static lights, and so my shading quality was suffering as a result. It looks so much better now, and I can’t thank them enough for the feedback. You seriously need a second pair of eyes on your work sometimes. It really helps elevate your work to a better standard.
