Environment Selection

The other half of this project is the creation of an environment, which will be a game level in the Unreal Engine, where the two characters will be set. Naturally, it must make sense to see these characters in this environment. Theme and time period are important.

The teachers' guidelines for this part were more loose than the guidelines for the characters. I don't have to copy the environment's concept art exactly, and I can mix and match aspects of different concepts together. There is a lot of room for improvisation, which is a necessity when making a whole environment, really.  A picture only captures one area of scene -- what is going on to the sides, or behind the "camera"? That part just needs to be (sensibly) made up. Overall, environment concept art is there to give the basic "look and feel" of the area.

One major thing to look at is the color - which will be achieved in 3D using a mixture of colored textures, fog, and lights. Color plays a huge part in the mood of the scene, so that's one thing that I want to replicate as closely as possible.

Also, look for where the light sources are, as light is another major part of an environment. All the light you see in the picture has to come from somewhere, and it needs to make sense. For example, if there are beams of light in a cavern, I need to remember to make holes in the walls that lead to the outside. It sounds basic, but sometimes you forget until you play your level and notice everything is too dark... There needs to be enough light to let the player see, of course. In the Unreal Engine, light is not rendered with the amazing realism that you can achieve in Maya... so sometimes, you do have to compensate for it by placing additional, invisible light sources to simulate reflected/bounced light. But that's for another day.

Choosing My Environments

So I have a thief and a skeleton knight as my characters. I thought having a cave, ruins, or a dungeon for my setting would be cool.

While I collected over 100 images for this part as well, I was overall more disappointed with these results. Most people really seem to prefer drawing characters over drawing places, so I didn't find such a huge variety of good-quality environments. When people do put a lot of effort into making a detailed area concept, it's usually for a video game or other existing project. It was hard to find quality concepts that hadn't already been used.  Many environment artists also love to make speedpaints or matte paintings of huge landscapes in the distance. Those pictures are usually not detailed enough for me to really use as reference for a level. As cool as an epic mountain range looks, I need something closer up...

Anyway, I ended up finding some pretty awesome pieces:

Descent by eWKn

Cave by eWKn

Mogwai Temple by eWKn

dungeon by wanbao

The first three are by the same artist, which is both convenient and awesome. The style is also consistent. The last picture is by a different artist, but I really liked it as well, because I felt like I needed an actual building somewhere. The cave areas are cool, but didn't have enough detail/stuff to feel like they would make an interesting level on their own. The oriental concept art is very cool, and is probably the most interesting of all the areas. It also gives me an excuse to model another dragon - the statue you see in the wall. The archway/entrance/door thing is highly decorated, however, and very sketchy. It'll take a lot of improvisation. I really like the flaming skulls, which make for really interesting light sources that can even be spread through the cavern areas. However, the oriental area is very small, as it's basically just a wooden bridge and a doorway. So I needed something more, and that's where the dungeon part comes in. I will extend the oriental theme into the dungeon as well, so it will look more sensible.

That's it for my environment.


Using Other Artists' Work

Just one more thing I'd like to mention is that I have made sure to ask all of these artists for permission to use their work. This is really important to me, ethically... though it doesn't seem like a big deal to many people. Understandably, I am a student and this is a school project, so it is for educational use and it is non-profit -- there is little harm in my use of this concept art. But it definitely doesn't feel right to use someone's art like this without them knowing. This project will likely be seen in my demo reel and portfolio website, possibly future employers, this is a big project. If I drew something and found someone else using my concepts to create their own art, I would be rather peeved that they hadn't even told me.  Oh well. Oh, and I am not sure using these without permission would actually be legal or not. I did a bit of research but I'm still not 100% sure. Either way, I went on the safe side and got permission from these talented artists. All of them were nice people.