[CE3] Colossus City (Catastrophic) - Inspired by The Last of Us City

Lycan

Hello Folks...!!!

I want to share with you about a City Stock Dummy I Developed in CryENGINE3 graphics engine. I call this City "Colossus" by the name of the Giant Statue. This place is a post-apocalyptic environment in a Deserted City in a couple of decades due to a number of Catastrophes caused by Globlal Warming.

This is not a copy of the City of The Last of Us, is only a fictional city that I maked inspired in them. I made this post-apocalyptic City to test my skills as level designer, because I'm still learning to use 3DMax, dammit...!!!



Screenshots

Lycan

The original game City is based on a post-apocalyptic Pittsburgh.















This map is poor optimized, has a lot of shadow and polys. In 1080 only get 45fps, as you can see in this picture.





I hope you liked it. Any questions leave a comment. Any criticism is welcome.

VESIUS

IMO overall it looks good, however there's a few things that stand out. For one there's way much going on, it looks like a sea of cars randomly placed everywhere which doesn't explain how they got there. I don't know what the "city" is surrounded by going back to the question "How did everything get here?". Maybe I'm not seeing something, but to me this looks more like an FPS map.

praetus

I'll be up front. There is no method to your madness here. It looks as if you just randomly threw a bunch of shit down with not a care as to why and called it done. There 's a wrecked plane in the background, but no destruction around it, no fuselage break up, etc. There is a train in there but I don't see any broken or intact tracks. Shit dude, now I see a tractor. You have random props that are obviously pulled out from the editor with no reason. I see barrels, file cabinets and trash cans. I think there might be a stove top as well. Why?

As a level designer you are there to frame a story. Where is it? What is it. Every scene from "The Last of Us" that you posted tells a story. The other objective as a level designer is to aid the flow of gameplay. I don't know what type of game you had in mind, but there is no set path and nothing to lead my eye. It's a mess.

Sam Hatami

Hi Lycan!

I think you've have something interesting going on here. So I can offer some insight of some fundamentals. Don't have much time, so I'll probably have to cut some parts short.

1. Composition:

Because you have so many objects scattered randomly, there isn't really much for the eye to rest on. Even if composition is mostly shown in specific shots you need to think of this in your entire scene.

If you look at the first picture you can see I divided it into six sections. In all of these sections there are tons of stuff that can catch the eye. You need to figure out places of "rest" for the eye, for instance: the sections 5,6,8 and 9 can be a composition of its own. That terrain part is quite good to break of the middle ground to background, as well as there are open areas for the eye to rest in the foreground.



2. Values:

Values help the eye defining what is near and what if far away from the "camera". In reality we have our depth perception to guide us of this, but we also have a lot of value changes. In your scene, everything is almost equally full bright or equally dark, meaning it's difficult for the eye to figure out what actually is a start of a shape, and what is the end of another.

In box nr 2, I took the croped screenshot from above and desaturated it. You have tons of values, spread over the foreground, middle ground and background. You would like to separate these by increase or decrease of values.

In box nr. 3 I lowered the brightness and contrast of the background, I decreased the contrast near the rough terrain even further by adding some fog. The over all mid-tones are tinted with blue.

In a game scene like this, the fog helps a lot to create a value contrast to emphasizes the distances between each scene element (foreground vs background).



3. The actual scene:

You have tons of randomly places objects, which is fine, if the above was more confined in your scene.

Making use of simple story elements as placing objects near logical sources, for instance tumbling cars near the tank instead of placing cars around it. Or scatter boxes near a trolley instead of in between cars.

Basically think of a reason why your objects are in the scene and how they ended up getting there.

4. The lighting:

You probably want to contrast the yellowish hued sunlight by a blue tinted ambient.

You've done a good job with your props, most of them seem to be quite well made. Must have taken a lot of time creating the tank and the train, so kudos!

Edit: Oh...stock models?

Sam Hatami

oops, double.

MMK3

Hi, I was wondering, if I could have your permission to use your picture, (the top one)? To edit, it will be the background of a 'The Last Of Us' poster.
I will PM you the results if you wish. Please get back to me when you can