My responsibilities were:
Modular Construction: I developed a modular construction method that allowed designers and artists to work seamlessly together as well as keep complex levels within budget. Looking at the concept, I started to identify repeating shapes that could be built modular. I would often do little testbeds like the screenshots below to show everyone on the team how the kit of parts worked together.
Base Textures: I started to paint a set of textures to represent all the major surfaces (walls, floors, ceilings, dividers..etc). These textures were clean and non-distressed. Rather "boring" as compared to the more grungy textures typical of most game environments. Lighting was key to pulling of the mood in this space.
Set Dressing:
I developed a workflow that allowed set-dressing and asset-artists to work in parallel. I made stand-ins for all the assets in the prop-zoo with the correct pivots and set dressed with those. Once the assets were finalized by the asset-artist, the stand-in props would automatically get updated in the right locations. I did a lot of final tuning of textures and assets as needed.
Lighting, Shaders, PostFX: I was responsible for working with the engineers and provide the specifications for the lighting system. I proposed we use a global illumination system rather than Unreal Engine's native hand-placed lighting workflow. Also we added support for high dynamic range with a linear workflow. We also added tonemapping, LUT (Look up tables), Depth LUT (Depth based lookup), Vignette, Aparture flares, HDR Bloom.
- Look development, including creating shaders, atmospherics, post process, and VFX elements.
- Responsible for creating specifications for the rendering system and working closely with engineers on implementation often prototyping and doing some of the coding myself.
Below is an outline of my process.
Concept Development: This environment is a modern biomedical research lab which the player must infiltrate undetected. I started looking at a lot of reference of set pieces and architectural details to help sell the story and gameplay. I quickly mocked up some spaces in Maya. Here is the approved mock-up.
Prop Zoo: I started to do a lot of image research regarding props and set pieces. I needed to come up with a set of props that was visually complex, unique, and fit within the memory budget. This collection of props we knew as the "prop zoo".
Final Concept: The prop-zoo, mockup and references was handed over to Ryan Church (http://www.ryanchurch.com/) . This is the final concept.
Base Textures: I started to paint a set of textures to represent all the major surfaces (walls, floors, ceilings, dividers..etc). These textures were clean and non-distressed. Rather "boring" as compared to the more grungy textures typical of most game environments. Lighting was key to pulling of the mood in this space.
I developed a workflow that allowed set-dressing and asset-artists to work in parallel. I made stand-ins for all the assets in the prop-zoo with the correct pivots and set dressed with those. Once the assets were finalized by the asset-artist, the stand-in props would automatically get updated in the right locations. I did a lot of final tuning of textures and assets as needed.
Lighting, Shaders, PostFX: I was responsible for working with the engineers and provide the specifications for the lighting system. I proposed we use a global illumination system rather than Unreal Engine's native hand-placed lighting workflow. Also we added support for high dynamic range with a linear workflow. We also added tonemapping, LUT (Look up tables), Depth LUT (Depth based lookup), Vignette, Aparture flares, HDR Bloom.
In addition to lighting specifications, I also wrote an uber-shader that could be tuned to represent lots of different surfaces. Lastly, a lot of attention was put towards the post processing shader to really tune the overall color grading. I would often prototype these systems and hand off prototypes to the rendering engineer to make it into the final game. Below are shots from the final result.
This side by side comparison shows the enhancements from our old lighting model to our new global illumination lighting model. Note the accuracy of the shadows, bounce and tonemapping.
