Towards the end of the year, our team of four spent about six weeks of our student lives turning this:

Into this:

 

Work in progress

How the scene developed as we gradually refined our assets.

 

A closer look at some of the assets.

Brief thoughts on things learnt:

• A major limitation of that orthographic reference is the lack of height info. Climbing and dropping through an environment makes a level much more interesting and dynamic. We had to use a grey box model and concept sketches to flesh out that aspect of the design.
• In a game environment where we have to be stingy about how much data we expect the system to process, the models themselves can be very low in detail and still look great as long as the silhouetted shape looks right against the background. In this case it’s the texture and lighting that makes the most impact on how a scene looks.
• Textures and lighting go together. It’s pretty hard to test one without the other. Some times it feels a little bit like a chicken and egg situation so a good approach seems to be to test early and often (like with so many other things!)

 

See more on Behance

Rendered in Arnold, composited in Nuke.

Interesting that the ambient occlusion pass made the biggest difference to how well the bicycle nestles into the scene. Next time I would probably deal with the shadows separately to the rest of the object. I was trying too hard to get extra shadow on an already shaded area and ended up overblowing the specular highlights. Had a lot of fun with the atmospheric effects, volumetric scattering is beeaautiful.

After three weeks at AIE we’ve covered quite a bit of ground. We whizzed through a good block of fundamentals such as modelling, texturing and lighting. Here’s my first attempt at a scene. It’s something of a cross between an apothecary’s cellar and a tavern.

Look who is trolling the scene. (Mel has been playing too much harvest moon)