UE4 Student Project - Slum Environment Pack

Hey Everyone!

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.

Concepts:




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.

Portfolios:
Kit - www.kitgrande.co.uk
Elliott - www.elliottpacel.co.uk

This project looks fantastic, those are some of my favorite films as well. Good design an great taste, look forward to seeing how this progresses!

Also, is that a Greggs and a Pub amongst the buildings lol? Love it.

This looks awesome. We definitely follow your progress

Maybe that’s a greggs :wink: 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.

cheers for having a look :slight_smile:

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 :smiley:

Hey guys,

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.


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More materials to make but next up is the tileset to be used with Elliott’s building blueprint :slight_smile:

Bit of an update on the level, things have changed a bit :slight_smile: lots in the works and elliot should be doing some videos explaining the tools he’s made soon :slight_smile:

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A great Start yo. Keep it up.

nice progress
Keep it up!

Cheers guys! Here are some of the assets I’ve been working on recently:


Blueprint Tools Update

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.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=95zUxzXxzZE

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

I LOVE those broken windows. They look fantastic!

This is coming along great, assets are really high quality. I’m not feeling the bendy pipes though :stuck_out_tongue:

Thanks a lot! Kit’s been working really hard to get all the assets as higher quality as possible. :smiley:
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. :slight_smile:

Oh my Gawd! This is indeed sooooo sexy! Nice work mate!

Ah gotcha, I had a closer look and realised the bends were on separate pipes, from the angle it looked to me it was all on 1 pipe xD. Keep it up!

Really like what you guys are doing here!

Decal and Tools Update

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.

Road Markings:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JD46Skh1vpw

Graffiti:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T17vrdkR0uw

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

@ePacel

Where did you learn to make interactive actors like that? I would love to see how you did it. :slight_smile:

Nice work guys! Are you guys planning on releasing those tools maybe selling them on the marketplace?