Next Project. Starting point

For the starting point of my next project I decided to redesign one of the dark souls 2 location. Its hub Majula. But it is important to note that the end result might be far from the starting point and it might not even be fair to call it redesign then. But it is not important.

 I feel like redesigning existing location will give me restrains and a sense of direction I needed. Overall, I find it hard to create an environment. I like working on models, materials and level, but it is hard to bring that all up together to create a cohesive whole. I think I might have not given myself enough guidelines in the past and the structure of my work wasn't the best. I’ll try to fix that with this project. 

Dark souls 2 left me with a lot of disappointment and made me think of ways I would improve it if I had an opportunity. There were lots of environments I could choose for this exercise, but I decide it would be the best to focus on its hub. Majula is the central part of ds2 game world that leads to other areas. It is directly tied in with player progression (levelling up, upgrading gear) so it is visited more often than any other area in the game. It represents whole game, the key design decisions, aesthetic, philosophies. But for the location of this importance it's lacking in many respects in my opinion.

 

Let’s compare it to locations that had the same role in other entries to the souls’ series.

Hubs in other games have a much stronger aesthetic. Their use of colours and contrast values creates more intriguing environments.

They have much more interesting level designs, that focus a lot on verticality. On the contrary Majula is flat.

The use of monumental structure makes other hubs look more significant, it leaves a stronger impression on the player. Majula looks bland an uninteresting. Of course an argument could be made that it was an international decision. And in all fairness it probably was. But I can't say it was a right call.

Redesign process:

I decided to start with finding a proper mood for the location I would like to design. For a time of day I've chosen morning. This won’t only influence the colour palate or mood of the location, but also add to subtext. A morning could mean the beginning of the journey, the hope, energy, fitting themes for one of the first area in the game and one players use for the rest.
But mornings can differ a lot depending on weather conditions. So I gather reference photos and created few scenes that represent different types of morning weather and different atmospheres.

So to bring some order to my work I'll make a schedule and try to follow it!

Week 1-2 - Concept art, sketches

Week 3-4 - Design, blockmap 

Week 5 - big assets, materials

Week 6 - props

Week 7- onwards - building environment in engine.

Viking Longhouse Part 3.

Here are some screen shots of that environment. Unfortunately I lost my whole ue4 level. So I need to start with something new for the last semester. But I learn a lot while working on this, and hopefully I'll be able to use that knowledge in the future.

The base for the design of this building was a viking longhouse. But I encounter a problem, it was lacking verticality. Tho it wasn't the crucial part I wanted to put this building in the centre of a scene, a scene build around it so making it high would help a lot with drawing player attention. I borrow from stave church design and tried to mix them both together.

    

Making a straw roof was tricky task. My method was to create bunch of planes  with texture with alpha for transparency. But it looked artificial. Unfortunately I didn't find any tutorial on that or even good examples of breakdown of roof like that.

I might have overdone with amounts of details in skeleton of this building, but I really wanted to make it look believable, like a building that could exist and do not defy the laws of physic. That's why I add a lot of elements in roof support. Though I suspect a lot of players would not pay attention to those details.

All small props shared the same material. Substance Painter allowed me for quick and easy material creation.

Viking Longhouse Part2

I started to build an environment in UE4. I decided to start with one big building, a Viking long house to be precise.

Unfortunately, I didn't start with blockmap in UE4 with providing a lot of problems that could be avoided otherwise. I didn't accommodate for camera position of player character or its speed. So that will be something I had to take into consideration for future levels.

I tried to keep every model in one scene to constantly compare the size of an object, to make sure they are proper. Creating this scene was a tricky task,

Even though I thought I know how many models or what models I need I fond myself in constant need of adding more models or recreating old ones.

It was important to me to create models that would fit together. So I used texel density script to make sure all my models have uniform texture size.

I spent a lot of time in Substance Painter feeling more and more comfortable with it.

I wanted to optimise a texture space so many of my similar models shares the same materials. So I had groups of meshes and every group have its own material. But OJ from White Paper games, advised me to create one material that can be reused for different purposes rather than creating lots of different materials. I didn't do that cos I was worried about UV seams and it is easier to cover them when creating individual textures. Anyway, it is something I have to test.

Viking Longhouse Part1

So for the next level I decided to create smaller, more contain environment.
I wanted to do a viking village, so I started gathering some reference photos on pinterest.

https://uk.pinterest.com/kamilsroka/viking-ships/

https://uk.pinterest.com/kamilsroka/viking-architecture/

https://uk.pinterest.com/kamilsroka/viking-props/

I made some sketches to gave some shapes to my ides, but I unfortunetlly I didn't made any concepts. And in retrospective I  think it was bad decision. I didn't have clear image of what I was going for.