Time: 08/2023 - 09/2023, 2 months
Team Size: Personal Project
My Role: Concept Designer, World/ Level Builder, Film Maker
Tools: Unreal, Blender, Gaea, Photoshop
After a comprehensive study of the game scenario construction pipeline, I embarked on a hands-on exercise to solidify my understanding. I envisioned a city poised at the brink of dusk and endeavored to narrate its tale through pivotal scenes in a short film spanning two and a half minutes. This exercise underscored the significance of integrating pipelines into one's workflow. Not only did it professionalize my approach, but it also markedly enhanced my efficiency.
The Story
Chapter 1 : The Eternal Divide
The sun had not moved for as long as anyone could remember. On one side, the land was a blistering desert, the ground cracked and scorched. On the other, a frozen wasteland, where nothing moved or breathed. But between these two extremes, in the narrow band of twilight, life persisted.
The city-states that dotted this twilight zone were marvels of human ingenuity and desperation. Towering spires and sprawling complexes, all designed to extract every last resource from the dying earth. The rich and powerful lived in the upper echelons, while the poor and downtrodden were relegated to the slums, where red sewage flowed like rivers and the ground was encrusted with white salt.In the heart of one such slum lived a young girl named Lira. She had lost an eye in a factory accident, and the other was a pale blue, frozen in a perpetual look of despair. But beneath that icy gaze burned a fire, a desire to see something more than the endless twilight.
Chapter 2 : The Descent
The city was crumbling. Resources were dwindling, and the divide between the rich and the poor had never been more pronounced. The nobility, in their opulent palaces, feasted and celebrated, while the masses starved.
Lira had heard tales of a place beyond the ice fields, a land of abundance and hope. It was said that those who ventured there never returned, but Lira was undeterred. She gathered a crew of like-minded souls, each with their own reasons to leave the city behind.
Chapter 3 : The Journey
Their journey was fraught with danger. They crossed vast salt lakes, their surfaces shimmering in the eternal sunlight. They trekked through scorched forests, where the trees were little more than charred husks.
But with each step, Lira's determination grew. She had seen too much suffering, too much injustice, to turn back now. The ice fields loomed ahead, a vast expanse of white and blue. It was said that beyond them lay hope, and Lira was determined to find it.
I started by pinpointing the central themes and components of the scene, which included a walled city, a village, a marshy salt lake, and an ice field. To grasp the intricacies of these structures and terrains, I sought out pertinent photographs for reference. Subsequently, I crafted two conceptual sketches, drawing from my own vision of the key viewpoints and color palettes.
Drawing inspiration from the preliminary concepts, I employed the Gaea software to programmatically design the required terrain, encompassing lakes, snow-clad mountains, and an intervening plain. Making the most of Gaea's texturing features, I fashioned multiple masks for the various regions, which were subsequently integrated into UE's terrain editing.
In UE, I constructed white boxes using geometry, fine-tuning them to suggest relationships between structures and player pathways. Concurrently, I sketched the initial draft of the subplot and mapped out camera positions using UE's sequence editor. This exercise also led to further adjustments in the white box scene.
I completed the detailed sculpting of the nearby landscape terrain in UE, followed by the formulation and application of terrain materials.
After finalizing the layout for the city and village, I employed a plug-in to procedurally generate the forest and ground vegetation. I selected stark black trees to provide a striking contrast against the white salt marshes, and strategically placed fallen tree trunks throughout the scene for added diversity. The distribution of low-lying shrubs was meticulously controlled by delineating curves corresponding to road placements and by assessing distances to boundary lines. Given the inherent unpredictability of procedural generation, I had to iterate this process multiple times.
Once the majority of the scene setup was in place, I selected a few pivotal scenes and primary player interaction areas for detailed refinement. This entailed integrating human elements into the village, incorporating particle effects like flames and ropes, adding decals, and revisiting the ground textures to infuse more detail.
Additionally, I focused on lighting design to accentuate the contrast between light and shadow in the composition, using light color to amplify the ambiance of the scene.
