After Week 7 of our Creative Industries module, our group was given crucial feedback on our art style, which was that our visuals in the Unreal project did not look like our chosen Saturday Morning Cartoon style, and that we are crucially behind getting our lighting test finished. As a result of this, I knew we would need to take a step back and re-evaluate how we were going to capture our art style, with the main things to consider being our textures, our lighting and render style in Unreal and making our 2D character feel like they fit in the environment. In addition, we were also notified later on that in Unreal, cartoony styles are harder to replicate than realistic styles due to Unreal lighting engine being better suited for realism, so we were going to have our work cut out for us.
To start, I decided to revisit our textures and experiment in Blender with different texturing methods, namely using ambient occlusion and shaders to create a black outline on a prop to see if it would help push the cartoony style. Once I showed this version to our lecturer, I was given the advice that the outline shader would need to be redone in Unreal, and that our props would benefit from having properly drawn on linework.
Below are screenshots of the test changes I made to our box prop in Blender, with the original version beside it for reference. In addition, I have also included rough guides for how to move forward with texturing our environments to help the rest of my group.
Moving on, I then divided up our already existing props with another member of the group, Odhran, and we’d agree to texture them separately following the style I outlined above. Due to our lighting test needing to be done, I decided to get the more diverse looking props done first so we’d get a better understanding of our lighting in Unreal. The props I did were the Jewels loot prop, the minigame screen prop and the large pipe prop. Which can all be seen below, I feel like all three of these props have a much better amount of detail and fall much more in line with the art style we aim for, especially through the use of the ambient occlusion, emissive layers and height maps.
Furthermore, I also was sure to get our ladder prop finished as one of our interactable props for our submarine environment. This was a prop that was assigned to Odhran, so I tried to have it done soon and in line with our art style, which can be seen below.
