So… here is something that I spend the last 2 days on.
So yesterday I thought of creating this using some of the available assets in the marketplace. So I used 1 rock from the caves map and a few infinity blade assets to flesh this out.
I did begin with some ultra rough blockouts…
But did not spend much time on blocking out because I had a good idea of what I wanted and just could not wait to start messing with the assets.
Once I had the pathways sorted out I started bombing the map with rocks.
Now on to lighting this thing. At the moment all that is there in the level is a directional light. So add some main light dominant light source and run some tests.
Now… personally, I did not like the indirect lighting and wanted to go with a little more darker approach. So I turned it off and tried something else.
That looked much better. Now on to add some exponential height fog.
And that seem good. Finally threw in some random assets to give the scene some life… And here we are at the end of 2 working days.
Pretty freaking cool. Amazing how far we’ve come in game development in the last 20 years, that you can throw something like that together in a day or two. Yeah, I’m pretty old.
Keep it up dude!
work!! I think I need to learn more about lighting and how to achieve this type of look for dungeons. Can you explain a little more what you did with the lighting? Is this just a directional light or what?
I have one directional light and 2 spot lights that is used as primary sources of lights for the scene. Infact… the directional light does nothing to light the scene to be honest. Its just 2 spot lights.
Because the scene is interior, and a mix of bright and dark areas, directional light will do nothing here.
----- Key thing to Note : is that, the first light, I wanted it to be strong as it hit the surface of the bridge and the rocks nearby it… and not to light up the area nearby because the light has a high intensity. So I turned off the indirect lighting intensity on this light by bringing the value to 0.
While this did not matter much for the second light .
Once this was done, I added some point lights to nearby areas just to give a sense of indirect lighting.
And Added some Lights for fire torches, It’s always good to have a mix of contrasting colors for a scene to keep it visually interesting. These lights were set to movable.
Also to note - Materials play a huge role in getting the lighting to work right. Had I made materials for the scene , the scene would not have looked anywhere as this
I had an idea of porting this over to UT, but dont know if that is possible. Theoretically it should be but waiting to find out. Ofc there needs to me major changes when it comes to lighting and contrast If I’m considering UT…
Alright you guys… so… I went ahead and did some more work on the map - Expansion sort of…
So as usual… started off with blocking out with meshes this time… I wanted to go for an “all in” cavern sort of style… so… bombarding with rocks… And after that went ahead and started shaping out some forms with the castle assets…
At this point I wanted some center of attraction. So I used this statue here and scaled it so big that it would be the center of attraction in the whole universe.
So far so good… now as always… test lighting…
Now that looked fine… I went ahead and added some light sources for the exterior building portion…
And gave the statue a light for his own as well
And went ahead and completed the lighting portion for the building exterior…
At this point something was troubling me… It was the focus around the statue… I felt it was a little too much that the building in the background was losing attraction. so I went head and closed down the cave for the time being and kept the entire scene in the dark…
I liked this… things started to get more stand-out and grab some attention. I went ahead and replaced the fires particles with one from a pack off the unreal market place.
So far so good… Now one more portion remained… So I went ahead and started blocking out a form with the shapes I had…
And once this was set… I went back to lighting the scene. I brought back the light that was focused over the statue and focused it over the structure… This gave a new sense of life to the scene… Something that I felt happy about…
After a small tweak to the angle of the light… I found what seems to be the best fit for the scene…
Amazing work, clearly shows the importance of lighting in a game.
Out of curiosity, did you ‘assemble’ all those rocks into one mesh, or are they really so many rocks? Just asking because I’m guessing performance-wise, this isn’t the nicest approach
For the time being they are individual pieces. Once I’m done with the scene I’ll look to combine them into one asset… I guess … Plus the map is streamed into 3 levels… so as of now performance doesn’t seem to be a major issue xD
… just 1 rock from the Caves demo
