Hey everyone:)
I've just finished up working on my pirate themed concept that you can see below, so I thought I would write a blog post to show you my plans for my next project.
I've been really enjoying doing these concept style images where I'm mixing game art techniques then painting over them in Photoshop afterwards. However, for my next project, I am going to be moving back onto creating another 3D real time environment inside of Unreal Engine 4 has this is my day job and want to make sure I'm keeping up my environment art skills.
A few years back, I did an art test for epic games which has inspired this next project. Unfortunately, I'm not allowed to show the original test but what I'm going to do is redo the asset completely and change a lot of stuff to make it more my own concept, I will also be doing a full environment rather than one prop.
The project that I'm going to be making a New York building/ rooftop modular kit in a mixture of the 'Sea of thieves'/ 'Fortnite' style. I will also have a few hero assets on top of the modular kit, I have done a really quick sketch of the environment below.
I'm hoping that this project will take me around two months and I will be posting a weekly blog post at the end of every week to document my progress. I have roughly planned this project and broken down the asset list which can be seen below.
week 1- blocking out all the assets
week 2- making the architecture modular kit
week 3- brick texture
week 4- water tower hero prop
week 5- water tank hero prop
week 6- generic assets
week 7- lighting
week 8- feedback + changes
This is only a rough timeline and some things may go over and life may get in the way which tends to happen but I'm hoping to stick to this plan has much as possible. I have broken my assets down in to three areas, the architecture modular kit, generic assets and hero assets and you can see a list of these assets that I'm going to make below.
Architecture modular kit
- Door piece
- Window piece
- fire escape
- balcony trim
- Wall plain Piece
- corner piece
- drain pipe kit
- wall trim
Generic Assets
- Satellite Dish
-Ladders
-Skylight
- AC Vent Kit
- Planks of wood
-Trash/ debris
Hero Assets
- Water tower
- Water tank
- AC Unit
I will then do a nice brick material that mortar vertex paint blend and potentially set up all the shaders for world aligned snow.
The goal for this project is to show off some really nice stylized sculpt assets and I will move back on to doing some more realistic concepts afterwards. The final presentation for this project will be a few Artstation posts, one for each hero asset and the main brick material and then I will do one diorama image that matches the sketch above and I will then do a video flythrough of the kit in use in a full environment rather than in a diorama image.
It may seem strange that I'm switching between concepts and 3D projects and different styles but I'm trying to get an end result of a portfolio that shows the full game art workflow from concept to the final game environment in a range of styles which will hopefully help me gain a role as an Art director way later down the line.
That's all for the first post and thank you for reading! I will hopefully have all of these assets blocked out by the end of this week and I look forward to completing this project.
All the best,
Dom.