We are Game Art Design students at De Montfort University UK, creating a slum environment pack and demo environment for our Final Major Project at Uni. Hopefully we will create the assets and tools to allow anyone to create a level or environment based in our city or just a generic slum environment. We’re putting a British twist on the city but other than that we are mostly creating modular, reusable asset packs.
The city is set in a large cove providing shelter from the harsh storms and winds experienced on the flat planes above. As time went on the cove has been slowly opened up by the extreme weather and the cliffs have broken down opening the city up to the incredibly harsh waves and storms from the sea. This city is struggling to survive between the windswept heaths and the destructive sea. To protect the city a breakwater was created which had little affect on the huge waves and so an even larger breakwater was created to protect the lucky and wealthy leaving behind a section of the city to face the elements. This is where our level will be situated the slum near Breakwater 31. We watched films like Children of Men, Snowpiercer, District 9, Elysium and have used game worlds such as Half-Life 2, Last of Us and Homefront as reference for various ways to create the depth of world.
I am Elliott Pacel, a Technical Artist, working with me is Kit Grande, an Environment Artist. Kit’s main focus is on the material definition, construction of the art assets and building the demo level. The assets are going to be realistic and high fidelity for use on PC and VR and LOD-ed enough to run on mobile giving the asset pack a wide scalability.
My focus is to create the tools to work alongside these assets:
Building blueprint which will create an easy way to create buildings of varying sizes, wall meshes, materials and colours.
Spline-based positioning for things like cables, hanging lights, barbed wire and cliff sections.
Random asset placement system which will allow the user to add meshes and randomly position them to quickly populate areas.
As well as shader and VFX work later on.
We’ll be posting up updates on the project as it develops. But equally you can follow our project website and blog (www.keproject.co.uk) as well as following me on Twitter @KEProject_E for live updates on the project.
Maybe that’s a greggs can’t say for sure. I’m hoping some assets will allow people to make things like that, not sure how to approach things like the text yet but we’ll see.
This is looks very promising! I really like the look you’re going for and the reference material you have is very good. I’ll be following your progress
Bit of an update, I’ve been getting some of the base materials down for the asset pack. They are SUPER clean at the moment so they need to be grunged up and worked on but they should provide a solid base to work from.
I used Substance Designer for most of the materials, some, like the tarpaulin are completely procedurally made in substance.
I have sculpted the breeze block and feel I need to do the same for the brick. I also want to make a brick variant which is less well constructed for some of the slumstyled buildings so that it looks as if they haven’t been there long and aren’t particularly well made.
I’ve put together a quick video to show the 3 main tools that will be included with the Environment Pack.
They’re still WIP but most of the functionality is there now.
I’m hoping to do more in-depth video’s for each one when they’re done explaining how to use them.
You can follow their development more at: blog.keproject.co.uk
Thanks a lot! Kit’s been working really hard to get all the assets as higher quality as possible.
The pipes are based off the overground pipes in Berlin. http://goo.gl/ycwOD6 Obviously they are unfinished in these shots but we do have plans for them.
Update on some of the decal work I’ve been doing, and the tools I’ve made in blueprint to support them.
Everything to be included as part of the Decal section of the Environment Pack.
They’ve still got some work to go but that’s where they’re at now.
I’ve also got some particle effect stuff I’ve been doing, hopefully post that up here soon.
You can follow their development more at: blog.keproject.co.uk