[UE4] Sane – Third Person Adventure Game
polycounter lvl 4
Hi guys, we are a group of students working on a small game in unreal 4.
We just finished working on our prototype recently and are going to focus on the art next. (take a look at our unreal thread if you want to know more about the game)
I would like to share our art progress with you and plan to update this thread every two weeks.
The current plan is to finish our 7 characters and at least 2-3 of our 7 environments within the next seven months.
Atm we have a bunch of concept art, all levels greyboxed and started working on the characters.
For now Im just going to post a semi random selection of what we have
Concept Art by Lukas Koelz (thats me) for the main character Amelié:
I also did a first pass on the 3D Modell when we started the project but time has passed and I would like to revisit it at some point.
This one is a render for one of our NPCs called Arthur Cornell:
And atm Im working on a NPC called Emma:
For most of the other npcs we only have concept art:
Another talented member of our team minibabylizard is also working on a bunch of characters:
She also did the concept Art for Emma:
And started translating her concepts into 3D:
We cant really share any environment art at this time since it all looks like this :
I hope you enjoyed this small selection of wip shots and that you stay tuned for more
We are really looking forward to sharing our progress over the next months feel free to C&C!
We just finished working on our prototype recently and are going to focus on the art next. (take a look at our unreal thread if you want to know more about the game)
I would like to share our art progress with you and plan to update this thread every two weeks.
The current plan is to finish our 7 characters and at least 2-3 of our 7 environments within the next seven months.
Atm we have a bunch of concept art, all levels greyboxed and started working on the characters.
For now Im just going to post a semi random selection of what we have
Concept Art by Lukas Koelz (thats me) for the main character Amelié:
I also did a first pass on the 3D Modell when we started the project but time has passed and I would like to revisit it at some point.
This one is a render for one of our NPCs called Arthur Cornell:
And atm Im working on a NPC called Emma:
For most of the other npcs we only have concept art:
Another talented member of our team minibabylizard is also working on a bunch of characters:
She also did the concept Art for Emma:
And started translating her concepts into 3D:
We cant really share any environment art at this time since it all looks like this
:I hope you enjoyed this small selection of wip shots and that you stay tuned for more
We are really looking forward to sharing our progress over the next months feel free to C&C!
Replies
Some updates on the sculpt of the beetle (minibabylizards work):
Also another one of our NPCs, Zoe is getting a full redesign and is currently in the process of getting sculpted and a haircut:
I havent been able to finish Emma yet, so much to do, so little time
As always C&C is very welcome!
Decided to make the hair a bit longer compared to how it was when I laid down the hair stripes.
Think Im almost done with the base and can move on to the cloth, still need to do the same for Emma.
I would also really like to go back and redo the mc
Also: Sneak peak of the redesign of Amelie, our main character
Tomorrow Im going to bake the textures for the hair and then it should be done.
Minibabylizard finished up the retopo for the beetle:
C&C is very welcome.
On to retopologizing and baking!
Still missing some shoes, the whole process is a little more complicated this time since we want her to be able to switch clothes during the game.
Should be able to finish this today!
And I guess this is the first time we are showing the new design in Unreal Engine
C&C is very welcome Im still working on this and Im eager to push it even further!
Since shes going to be very close to the camera I spend some time on the shaders to make sure the detail holds up:
I have three more characters that should be done soon and Im looking forward to sharing those with you too!
C&C is very welcome!
We welcome any kind of feedback so if you notice anything that needs fixing or have something else to say we are happy to hear it!
The next character we plan to share is our first non-human character so stay tuned for that
This one uses the NeoFur Plugin for Unreal Engine 4. I really love this plugin, easy to setup and looks phenomenal!
The clothing is still work in progress but the face and hair is close to being done.
Same model without cap:
Full body shot:
All screenshots are taken inside UE4.
Discarded wip clothing for anyone interested:
With this we are going to shift focus to the non-human characters and environments (for now).
Im really looking forward to working on the environments, its time our orange/green "grey"boxing makes way for some nice artwork
This render is straight out of Unreal Engine 4, to create the texture I use Substance Designer, I love the tool and I love the POM Shader in Unreal
Substance Graph:
Currently preparing some delicious pasta for our terrain shader:
Gonna share the result later today, we have a really cool setup with tesslation and paintable puddles which are masked by heightmaps etc.
Had quite a few problems with the terrain just displaying the basic grey material and other stuff but everythings working now.
Just gotta clean up those messy nodes.
This is the result of the spaghetti monster I posted earlier today:
Its one of our terrain materials. It blends between the textures with their heightmap and has distance based tessellation.
You can also paint in procedural puddles that conform to the underlying textures:
Same scene without puddles:
The puddles have settings like depth to control their color and opacity or edge wetness
I still get a weird x3004 compile error on the material but it doesnt seem to prevent it from working. Not really sure whats happening there it shows up suddenly and then disappears again...
It takes forever to compile after changing something so searching for the cause is giving me a headache. If somebody has experienced this before Id be glad to know what caused it.
Im quite happy with the result. What do you guys think?
I know what you mean, the internet has kinda ruined the perception of satyr like characters that look feline. That said we designed these characters with that in mind. He is intentionally a little disturbing to see, not so much that we would call it sexualized but enough to startle you for a moment. (or at least thats the idea).
The story allows and asks for stuff like that. Its about a childs psyche after all. Pans labyrinth is a big inspiration, so is Alice, Totoro and a few more like that. We think that topic is super interesting and hasnt really been explored much in videogames.
Our system uses vertex color to drive the world position offset of the material, very similar to what you can find in the content examples.
The reception of the breakdown for the landscape material we did yesterday really suprised us (in a possitive way). Please let us know if you are interested in more content like that.
It has some nice parameters and should allow for really fast placement.
Its xyz-worldaligned so that we can use it for nice blends between meshes.
The parameters drive how much of the rock it covers, how strong the normalmap should influence the result and if there should be a color overlay on the edge of the intersection (for nice brown moss around the edges)
Vertex color is used to mask the whole effect by hand.
Feel free to check it out and let us know what you think
Part three of our landscape material tutorial is online:
This one covers tessellation and displacement.
I can assure you that the content of these tutorials actually goes into the game!
Were currently doing a final art pass on one of our environments so I will be able to share some ingame screenshots for that soon, I think it looks amazing and I hope you will think so too!
With that said here is another tutorial:
This one covers out moss material layer and how to create it yourself. Hope these are useful to some of you
Lets celebrate with the first envrionment screenshot!
Still a work in progress ofc so critique is very welcome!
I might also change the light at some point. Atm its a directional and skylight and I would like to keep it simple as this environment is rather big, the light direction has to stay the way it is atm as there is a cave with a breakthrough in the ceiling that has light flooding in for a cutscene.
Current status:
I still struggle a bit with understanding how to use foliage in unreal. Atm its all instanced and set to movable as it seems that instanced meshes dont support lightmaps for lods. I then removed the shadows from all the meshes that dont need them or are very small and use inset shadows instead.
Took me a while to get it right. This is what it looked before which was horrible:
Im also still tweaking eye adaption, it seems to give the image a green/yellow tint and I really dont like that. Maybe I can get rid of that with some color correction in the post processing.
Ive seen a lot of scenes / games done in unreal where foliage looks really flat so I really wanted to get it right.
We had to focus on the gameplay demo for our graduation and im happy to say that we managed to finish it and you can watch a playthrough of it on youtube!
Some bg info for where we are in the story when this demo takes place:
The year is 1919 and you play as the young girl Ameliè who lost both of her parents in WW1.
Taken in by distant relatives Ameliè has to start living in a place completely unknown to her.
A place that seems to be straight out of a fairy-tale, talking animals, strange creatures and impossible environments are everywhere she goes, but how come no one else seems to notice them?
Explore a rich, semi-open world where you can find strange and mysterious characters to interact with and interesting places to explore with hidden secrets everywhere.
Or maybe you will do as you are told by your new family and stop dreaming?
Featuring a deep story, interesting characters and puzzles all of which adapt to the way you play and the choices you make.
Ameliès fate rests in your hands.
We enter the demo at a point where Amelie has been robbed of an amulet that contains an image of her dead parents and is following the thief deeper and deeper into a forest.
Reality starts to fade and Amelie finds herself in a magical place.
Sadly the project is going on hiatus for now. Lukas Koelz (thats me) Projekt Lead and Artist on the project is leaving for England in a week to join Playground Games and as such wont be able to work fulltime on the project anymore.
We would like to continue working on "Sane" at some point but we do not jet know when and how this will happen.
Ofc we will post here and let you guys know what we are up to when we have that figured out, in the meantime we are happy about any and all feedback for our demo