Hello, Unreal engine community. I’m Peter K. Lee, an environment artist.
I have finished Artstation game environment challenge yesterday.
The challenge was about making lost ancient civilization.
Most of artists were focusing on creating gigantic/epic scale scene. So I chose to work opposite direction, building small/cute scene.
“When the sun goes down, the pixie open their town in the tree”
close up shot
The following images are progress shots ans idea sketches.
The inspiration came from my old digital illustration, the fairy town. I always wanted to make it to 3D form.
Artstation challenge was a wonderful opportunity.
This is first thumbnail pass. I was thinking about the form of pixie town.
This is detail sketch stage. I thought uphill shape town and planet shape town would be interesting.
The uphill idea became the final idea since it was easy to understand and easy to make depth of the town.
I always approach my environment art as a 2D painting. So the lighting and composition are most important aspect of making a scene.
I put few color to imagine how the final scene looks like.
I knew the town is the most interesting visual point of the scene. So I had bunch of sketches. I realized a cool single building might looks ugly when I put 20 same buildings in one scene.
I built blockout scene in unreal4. The lighting and composition felt almost same as my idea sketch.
But I wasn’t happy about the town shape. So I decided to delete all buildings and start over.
It was really painful to delete things I made myself. But it turned out my best decision I made during the contest.
The girl in the scene was the connection point between human society and pixie society. Also, she is the character we can related to.
I spent 10 days to design her and making her. It wasn’t easy to find balance between cartoon style and realistic style.
My 8 months old daughter was helpful reference for the form of hand and feet.
I put vegetation on the scene. I felt so much life in the scene.
The street tree has been removed in order to finish the submission on time.
The final :
Thanks for reading long thread.
Feel free to leave comment/feedback.
-Peter K. Lee
