Development of Stylized Procedural Environment

The Idea

My aim to create a highly stylized, procedurally-supported game environment took inspiration from many places, a few being the Borderlands series, a childhood favourite: Toontown Online, and artistic influence from the fantastic artworks of Dr. Seuss.

The initial design of my project described a small town square where nature and manmade structure worked in harmony,  with an overall artsy "hand-painted" style.

The Breakdown

The base for this environment consisted of a procedural tool for created buildings, which I started early in development. Alongside this, I modelled unique assets using node systems to support this tool. These were all modelled and unwrapped in Houdini, and optimized to be lower-poly static meshes.

The building tool itself was also created in Houdini as a Digital Asset - in order to save time creating multiple buildings later on - using these unique pieces to build up the model, as well as various additional supports.

Texturing

With all of my modelling done, I moved on to texturing my assets. All of the unique pieces were textured in Substance Painter, with custom smart materials used between assets to keep the art style cohesive. Some elements such as the patterns, and the leaves, were hand-drawn. 

Besides these, I created an array of custom Substance Designer materials that had versatility in being recoloured in Unreal Engine (my game engine of choice for this scene creation). The bases for these textures left the colouring mostly white - with only some hue variation for visual interest - so that I could create coloured instances within UE.

Beyond this, I created two trim sheets also in Substance Designer, one for general asset use, and one for a specific centrepiece to the scene.

Scene Setup

With all of my assets, I began to layout my scene. Though I wanted there to be some sort of symmetry, I wanted to create a unique area in each corner of the central plaza. As I placed my buildings  I tried to create unique areas that would have interest.

After this came texturing everything and populating the scene with smaller assets such as the bins and benches, as well as foliage. I also used another custom Houdini Digital Asset in Engine using the plugin, to cook and bake these ivy plants onto some buildings, with varying leaf shape, colour and shize.

The Finished Product

The final scene includes all completely procedural assets and textures, particles systems, fabric simulations and animated foliage. In terms of optimisation, there is still a lot of work that could have been done, but for my first time using procedural modelling systems, I can definitely see the appeal. The enjoyment of using logical processes to create assets and tools is something I certainly enjoy and spurred me on to create other procedural assets for further projects unrelated to the assignment.

Further Projects

Inspired by practicality, I used procedural systems in a non-recreational game project to create modular assets and simple building tools. This time the assets were of a more realistic nature, given the purpose of the application to education - visual fidelity was key. As such, my assets had to match a similar level of detail to some third-party assets I had gathered.

As this project was to create an application, I  also had to learn the basics of widget design and Unreal blueprinting to assist. Animating assets like the door was very simple given the modular nature of perfectly measured assets in combination with Unreal's snapping features.

The practicality of modular assets made setting up and editing my scene layout very easy, and I went through many iterations of layout to try and find one that best suited my application.

The final scene was cohesive and blended my assets with the third-party ones to create a realistic game engine environment.

Thank you for taking the time to view my submission! :)