VIDEO GAMES

Video game industry produced work

Description - My role on this project as the Lead Technical Artist included:

• Managing the team of tech artists, hiring new artists, performance reviews, goal setting and regular support check ins. 

• Establishing early standards for the project such as naming conventions, folder organisation and asset standards.

• Establishing a roadmap for auditing and QC tools to service the project through its lifetime and support future projects.

• Evaluation of engine features namely world partition to determine feasibility, benefits and risks of project adoption. 

• Teaser trailer work including shader creation, Niagara VFX and Motion Design. 

• Prototypes for one of the games core visual features, interactive blueprint functionality and visual implementation using Niagara.

• PCG oversight and direction for the principal environments artist

• Chaos destruction exploration for environment interaction

This project involved two key milestones, the main one being a visual showcase to focus on the art and theme of the game,  and the second a smaller working design prototype to include the core loop mechanics for the game. 

One of the key visual features for the game which was applicable to both milestones involved a player controlled object that would interact with and affect other actors within the environment. This presented an interesting challenge as we were required to pursue the visual target for this feature while at the same time determine feasibility of the blueprint implementation itself. Testing a variety of approaches including post process buffers, material masks and FX integration we were able to trial the proposals at varying scales which helped us identify which methods were suitable to our intended scenarios. 

Taking our learnings from Flintlock, we were determined to start this project in a more organised and structured way, and so establishing early conventions and standards for asset naming and folder organisation were high on the priority list. These standards were well received once broadcast to the wider team, as there had been mutual frustrations with the prior project due to an absence of organisation. A metadata tagging system was also implemented in order to track assets through various 'Q' levels, to better monitor and assess the state of assets in both the library and in levels later in the project. 

Further R&D was required for the project as large decisions were being evaluated early on which would have long term implications for the project. World partition was one feature that was carefully considered, as coming from the level streaming system of UE4 there were known benefits but also challenges we had faced prior. Following our testing and risk evaluation we opted to introduce World Partition for the second milestone and planned to continue building on this as our foundation. 

Description - My role on this project as one of the 3d artists included:

• Creating the foliage asset library

• Handling the procedural layout of the foliage 

• Establishing the groundwork for an asset management system to support the needs of the artists both in house and remote. 

• Managing and maintaining the landscape maps,  island mesh alignment and worldspace positions.

• Creating Niagara VFX elements for use around the environment

• Creating other environment features and assets for use in the level - Modelling (Maya), Texturing (Substance painter), Material setup (Unreal).

• Lighting and visual composition for key views.

• Icon creation and rendering with Maya and Redshift.

• Rendering island turntables

• Establishing a suitable QC process for assessing the islands.

My first assignment on this project was creating the foliage library. This included reworking existing assets and modelling  new ones, while establishing a style that fitted with the concept art. Materials were also setup with parameter controls so colour's and glowing elements could be later controlled for additional variation. 

Making use of the landscape toolset and layer system in Unreal Engine 5, I was able to drive the placement of foliage and pathways onto the islands using alpha maps. I used a set of maps per island type, and by leveraging the procedural foliage toolset, was able to populate the islands with assets targeted to specific areas across all landscapes.

I was then able to fine tune the parameters of the foliage assets to dial in scale, density, slope angles and collision radius' that not only resulted in an artistically pleasing result, but also took into account how it impacted the player traversing on the undulating terrain. This was a key consideration, as there were certain locations on the islands the player needed to access, and we also wanted to encourage exploration through the denser parts of the foliage without concern of accessibility. Being that a procedural system was being utilised for variation of foliage across numerous islands, much care had to be taken to ensure this was mitigated both by the maps and foliage parameters as much as possible. 

Other environment features such as waterfalls, ponds, and hidden rooms were also required, and as such modelling work took place outside of the engine to create these. Establishing a two way worldspace offset was required to support this process so we could quickly and efficiently operate on environment components in context of the landscape in either application. 

Another core part of my tasks was to establish various Niagara VFX elements and their associated materials. These were made not only to supplement the environment and add some life to areas, but to cover various other general uses such as item pickup and triggered events throughout the game. 

Trailer here:

https://twitter.com/GravitaleHQ