Traveling between worlds | 3D Game Environment

Hello everyone!

I'm excited to show you my latest project. This real-time Game Environment was created for an assignment at PIXL VISN Media Arts Academy  and was done within one week.

REFERENCES AND PLANNING

The assignment was about creating an environment related to the topic "Fantasy".

After a quick research, I came up with the idea of creating a portal that connects two worlds. A dark, gloomy world in which it's cold and not much thrives and a bright, warm world with a mystical sunset. Since this project was my first time working with Unreal Engine, this setup seemed perfect for trying out different terrains and different light settings to get the most learning out of this work.

As a first step, I started to collect some images for reference and inspiration.

Once I had decided what I wanted my project to look like, I made a rough schedule. I liked the idea of the portal through which you can travel to another world. However, I wasn't quite sure how I could implement it technically. It was already clear to me that I also wanted a shot in which you effectively change worlds and not just a window through which you see another world. As a lot of things were unclear at the beginning of the project, I allowed for a fairly large time slot to test how I could implement my idea and whether there would be enough time left to develop the two worlds.

MY GOALS FOR THIS PROJECT

It's very important to me to learn new things and really challenge myself in this midterm/endterm project here at PIXL VISN Media Arts Academy. These one-week project phases are always very stressful and test you on many different levels but this allows you to practice what you have learned over the last weeks and really get used to working under stress.

I have set myself the following goals for this project:

- Create a shot in which you travel through the portal to another world

- Invisible transition between worlds

- Two different light setups (dark/bright)

- Getting used to Speed Tree

THE PORTAL

For the portal, I used this concept art from Ashfaq Wazir as a reference.

Since I knew that the portal would only be visible from the dark world and would be surrounded by trees and other plants, I tried to save some time here and didn't go into too much detail. The same approach was applied to the textures. I then used the finished portal in Speed Tree to create trees that nestle around the portal. Therefore a mesh and a directino force were used.

The modeling was done in Maya and the textures in Substance Painter.

SCENE BUILDING

Next, I imported the finished portal and textures into Unreal and integrated them into the scene. Then I gradually replaced the blockout elements with Quixel Bridge Mega Scans objects. I like to work in iterations, especially in the mid- and endterms where time is very tight. I first placed the most important/largest elements for both worlds. Once this is done, I gradually add levels of detail for all levels. This way I make sure that all levels are equally detailed at the end of the project and that I stay on schedule.

To realize the shot with the journey through the portal, I imported the portal and the animated cameras in both levels. I placed a plane in the middle of the portal intending to be able to select and remove it later in Nuke with the help of the cryptomat.

LIGHTING

I really tried to convey the story with the lighting. In a cold, dark world there is a passage to a beautiful, warm place. The surroundings are only very weakly lit with cold colors. From the other world, however, a warm light shines into this world. This light is just strong enough for a small flower to grow in its glow. For the final look, I used a mixture of skylight and several rect and spotlights.

In the second level, I used the Unreal Engine plugin 'Ultra dynamic Sky' to achieve this sunset look.

RENDERING AND COMPOSITING

Since I had to render both shots twice (once for each level), I ended up with quite a few frames. To look on the bright side, this definitely motivated me to optimize the render settings as much as possible. The project was rendered entirely in Unreal Engine using Lumen.

Compositing was done in Nuke. With the help of the cryptomate, I removed the added Plane in the Portal and Merged the Renders of the two Levels.

Thank you for taking the time to read through it all;  your feedback and support is greatly appreciated. 

That was another really intense but pretty fun midterm and as always the result is not as good as I hoped it would be. But that's probably quite normal when time is so limited. Not everything goes as expected and there are always things you would do differently next time. But that's what it's all about, pushing yourself to the limit, making mistakes and learning from them. The next project will be even better.