Game style

This week we continued working on the style of the game, the story and made up a starter asset list. We continued from last week and started thinking about the type of cabin, town and landscape our game will be set in. We knew it is set in Sweden so we started by researching Swedish villages and houses.

 

Now we knew we wanted it to be set in a snowy mountain, with the cabin up on the hill next to the graveyard away from the rest of the village, that way it would be a lot more isolating. Now we felt we finally had a good idea of what our games world would look like. So while the narrative designer worked on sorting of the story, me and some others went away and started the asset list. We decided to start small and just do the graveyard ones first. Below is our initial asset list.

• Head stones (multiple styles)
• Fences
• Trees
• Rocks
• Grass
• Gates
• bench
• Large Mausoleum

 

We split up the list between us 3D artists and got to work making them. We set a deadline for ourselves to have it finished for the next week. I chose to create the fences and the main gate. I began with the fences and stuck to the pipleine we 3D artists had discussed before which was to use Maya for modelling, Substance painter for texturing and then export at 1024 resolution as they didn’t need to be high quality. They would then be brought into the project in Unreal and shared with everyone through Github.

The first model I made was the fences. I figured I would make 3 different variations just for variety. I simply put together a few distorted cuboids until I got a very bent and damaged looking fence section. I then repeated the process for the other 2. My reference for the fences and gate were the ones used in The Nightmare Before Christmas, as it was a Tim Burton film and had the style I wanted. Below is the reface image I used and my 3 fence models.

Next I modelled the main gate for the graveyard. I used the same process I used for the fence to create the doors, then just piled up low poly stones for the doors to attach too. When doing this I made sure that the doors were hinged properly at the joints, so I included 2 small bars on each door, connecting them to the stones. That is were they will pivot. I kept the doors as separate objects so they can be rotated later in Unreal. Below is the reference I used ( the main graveyard gate from The Nightmare Before Christmas) and my model.

 

Now I began texturing them. I found it easier to texture the fences and the gate at the same time as they mostly required the same materials. After UV mapping them, I brought them one at a time into Substance painter and textured them. I wanted the metal bars of the fences and gate to look old, rusted and damaged so I used a base material of steel, then just applied a bunch of masks and other layers to change the shiny look on it. As for the stone pillars of the gate, I just used a base stone material then masked the edges to look scratched and worn. Basically I was again using the Nightmare before Christmas as a reference  as the colours in it are what I wanted. Below shows the final look of them all in Unreal.

 

This was me finished for the week. Next week we plan to go over a proper asset list.