Dawn Vengeance

Intro

After a rather rushed first attempt of using Unreal in the first stage of this Sumo Digital Rising Star Environment competition, I wanted Stage 2  to be a good illustration of my progression as a 3D artist using this software. 

In this documentation, I will summarise the process of development of my project, outlining the important decisions that were made along the way. 

The first step was to analyse the brief and identify the key points which needed to be taken into consideration during the design development, including:

. Your scene should fit into a maximum space of 30m3. You don’t need to use all of this space, but you should not    exceed it. Skyboxes & background elements are ok to be outside this area.
. Your environment scene will be based around one generalised, basic
location concept of your choice,
. The scene must show use of both organic and hard surface modelling, and include four key assets.

On reading the brief, it was clear that there was great scope for creativity and imaginative design. Therefore, before entering the pre-production of a specific scene idea, I spent time coming up with possible ideas. These included:

. New York abandoned alleyway
. Part of a Rio de Janeiro shanty town
. Cambodian Marble Mountain
. German tank abandoned in French Resistance barn
. Russian abandoned merry go round
. French Alps ski lift

Some showed potential but after consideration, I decided that the idea of a ‘German tank abandoned in French Resistance barn’ deserved to be developed further. This was because, not only would it give me great room for creating a variety of hard surface and organic modelling. It also offered the opportunity to create a scene with great atmospheric character.

Summary

Overall I am pleased with the final product, in terms of achieving my original aims and my technical progression.  The scene is evocative of an early morning woodland in central France, which is what I set out to achieve. The presence of the tank emerging from the barn, together with the other artifacts of war, gives the scene a menacing quality, while, the combination of the colour palette, mist, and artificial lighting creates a very ethereal atmosphere.

Successes
.  I have developed more varied technical skills and explored new software techniques.
.  This project has allowed me to expand my creative thinking into more immersive 3D environments. 
. I have constructed a scene that conveys atmosphere and is historically realistic that the viewer will be drawn into.
.  I have created a multi-layered environment that responds to the requirements of the competition brief, has deepened my technical knowledge and challenged my time management skills to successfully achieve a fixed deadline.

Scope for Improvement
. Whilst I am overall happy with models within my scene, I feel it would have been more appropriate to create my own models for grass and other vegetation/foliage, as it would have given the scene greater personal authenticity. A reason for not creating my own foliage was a result of lack of experience with organic modelling. I will be working on this in the future.
. I hope to improve my understanding of resolution in the future to better optimise my game environments.
. What was revealing with this project is my excessive use of vertex point, so in the future, I will look to better control my number of vertices, as this can have great effect on game playability.
. Finally, I aim to improve my substance designer skills so I can create more organic looking materials.

Unreal scene zipped package: https://drive.google.com/open?id=1QyNHizVNWxcpwUPJN3V4kMqXYqvLO9Uk