Insight - A Stylized Game Environment (Image heavy)

gestoryscht

Hi guys

I've finished my work for graduation at school and I thought it'd be nice to share it here. It was done in almost half of a year - from the level design concept, through white blocking and modeling all of the assets and set up the whole scene. It was a great experience and I'd be happy to answer any questions.

Trailer:
https://youtu.be/EEgnR_hv91Q

Full Walkthrough:
https://youtu.be/iYxstbTq5aA

Full resolution: https://www.artstation.com/artwork/5NGPA

And at last, but not least the credits to the one who helped me. Please check them out!

Music by Chris Zabriski
► http://chriszabriskie.com/
Licensed under CC BY 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Narration by Haley C McCarthy and Chloe Liao (links are in order)
►Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/haleymccvo
►Soundcloud: https://soundcloud.com/chloe-liao-va


Sound effects
►Sound effects obtained from https://www.zapsplat.com and https://freesound.org/
►Additional sound effects from Nate Marler: https://natemarler.com/

Illustrations by Marie Vorländer
►ArtStation: https://www.artstation.com/mavorie
►Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/mavorie/

Stay in contact and feel free to text me!
►ArtStation: https://www.artstation.com/gestoryscht
►Twitter: https://twitter.com/gestoryscht
►Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/gestoryscht/
►LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/aukehuys

Special Thanks to
►Marie Vorländer: https://www.instagram.com/mavorie/
►Craig Perko: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCFL6-QAPmuin1iXUY1MEe0g (helped me in terms of level design)
►Harry Greenaway: https://www.instagram.com/harry_greenaway93/ (helped me by programming)
►Marcel Schaika: http://www.marcelschaika.com/ (senior crytek environment artist helped me to get track)
►ARTunchained - https://www.artunchained.de/ (spend me his UE4 Export Helper Addon (https://blendermarket.com/products/ue4-export-helper)) - it saved me a lot of time!

TheLittleJay

Looks great! Colours and lighting especially. It's been nice to see this project develop into what it is now. 

alytlebird

Really solid work! I love how cohesive the environment feels as a whole, even though it's this collision of a bunch of different memories. The chalk drawings are a really interesting touch too; it had the potential to be overused, but it looks like you found a good balance.

I will ask though, any particular reason for the giant floating eye? Beyond the obvious themes of government surveillance...

Also, what kinds of challenges did you face with lighting this scene? It's a massive enclosed space so I'm guessing it wasn't straightforward haha. Any particular approach you took with that?

Doxturtle

Really great job with the lighting in this! Those glowing cave paintings work really well

gestoryscht

TheLittleJay said:

Looks great! Colours and lighting especially. It's been nice to see this project develop into what it is now. 

Thanks for your kind words! You've followed my WIP Thread? I should edit it to the thread for others

Doxturtle said:

Really great job with the lighting in this! Those glowing cave paintings work really well

It was my first unreal project and the light was really tough to handle, but in the end it turns out pretty well.
I can't wait for my next, personal project and this time it will be definitely an exterior ^^

alytlebird said:

Really solid work! I love how cohesive the environment feels as a whole, even though it's this collision of a bunch of different memories. The chalk drawings are a really interesting touch too; it had the potential to be overused, but it looks like you found a good balance.

I will ask though, any particular reason for the giant floating eye? Beyond the obvious themes of government surveillance...

Also, what kinds of challenges did you face with lighting this scene? It's a massive enclosed space so I'm guessing it wasn't straightforward haha. Any particular approach you took with that?

First of all, thank you!
It was a lot of work with a lot of iterations and in the end I am happy to end this with this outcome.

And yes, you are right. There is more background story for the giant eye, but sadly you won't be able to figure it out through this environment. Two friends of mine were developing a game and written a giant story for it and in the end, we canceled it, because it was to enormous. In the past, we tried to tell the story one of our profs and we needed just for the rough story around 90~ mins, because it was to complex to understand it on the first glance. We love it to telling deep stories. On the surface it looks pretty easy to understand, but when you investigate, there is a lot more.
I want to show you a screenshot of our whiteboard we used to develop the story.



As you can see in the navigator, this is a huge document. to read some text you have to zoom in around 1000%.
And there are two more documents It was a fun time to write this story, but it was way to much for a small team.

Anyway. I'll tell you the story for the eye in short. To be honest, the eye isn't used for the government surveillance at all in the general story. In this environment it's designed to look though, but for real it's more a symbolismn of an 'god', who was watching and manipulating us over our whole life. In short: Mankind destroyed itself, escaped under the earth, no food. They found this pinkish rocks. These let you mutate and you get 'immortal'. The gods of being doesn't like that and manipulated Yuu for her whole life, to lead her to death. She had a bad life. A really bad life and she hates now mankind. The game is a afterdeath experience, to enhance this death by over exaggerating the happenings to enhance the hatred even more. Her life was rigged. She was watched.
Yuu wants now to destroy the world ^^

For the lighting, I have no advice to be honest. It was a lot of work, but to be honest it wasn't that special.
The only thing I can say is, that it's extremely important to use realworld properties for the surface and light strength and enhance the bounces a lot. As already said, this was my very first unreal project, so I did a lot the wrong way, but in the end I got something working.
To be honest, I am kind of noob in unreal.

What helped me a lot, was the Lighting Academy by Daedalus51
https://forums.unrealengine.com/community/community-content-tools-and-tutorials/106867-unreal-4-lighting-academy-or-something-like-that

And this post process trick to get more colors in the dark.
https://answers.unrealengine.com/questions/210553/multicolored-fog-post-process-material.html

But what really helped me, was Luoshuang's GPULightmass. This saved my a**
https://forums.unrealengine.com/development-discussion/rendering/1460002-luoshuang-s-gpulightmass
Without it, I had a lot of light bleeding. Everywhere were strange light dots and ugly seams. I think this happened, because there war to much geometry to bounce of and the light scattered everywhere.

alytlebird

gestoryscht said:
*snip*

Ooohhhhh, those articles look really helpful, definitely gonna look into them, thanks.

Again, great work, and good luck on future projects.