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"Overwatch HQ" - Long-Term Environment Working Thread [UE4]

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I'm designing and building the Overwatch Headquarters which is located in the Swiss Alps. Check out the 2nd post for more explanation.

OWHQ Jan2018 Progress Walkthrough:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D8uwYfSW9tE

OWHQ has also been featured on 80 Level!


https://80.lv/articles/overwatch-hq-creating-a-game-level-for-portfolio/

All images are still works-in-progress!

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  • CptAlbatross
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    CptAlbatross polycounter lvl 4
    Damn man, this has been a huge treat to read through and a big boost of inspiration. Your comments about pro vs. amateur work really hit home and I can relate to a lot of what your wrote in regards to the props and texture study stuff. Thank you for providing the light bulb moment for not just myself, but I'm sure a lot of other artist on here trying to find their way. I'm really looking forward to seeing this fleshed out more and more. 

    Good luck!
  • izaakb
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    izaakb triangle
    Wow, this is truly amazing, just spent time reading this from the beginning and it's really enlightening on how you put it that this will help your portfolio from looking too much like a Junior portfolio. And already the quality is exceptional. Thanks for posting all your progress! Can't wait to see more!
  • CptAlbatross
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    CptAlbatross polycounter lvl 4
    One thing I am curious about is how you are setting up your working files in Maya. Do you have everything in one giant working file or is everything broken down into separate asset files and referenced in?
  • mutatedjellyfish
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    mutatedjellyfish polycounter lvl 10
    @izaakb <3 Thank you so much! If there's anything in here that's new to anyone and will help them progress or improve or even land a gig, than man, I'm happy I made the thread. Thanks for reading all of my too many words!

    @CptAlbatross And you too! Thank you so much. I've learned a ton since embarking on this project, both in the backend thought process as well as in the practical sense.

    And here you've hit on one thing where I feel like I've really kind of dropped the ball in this project, haha! My Maya files are not as clean as they need to be! 

    My blockouts and prototypes are a mess, but I quarantined those maya files as well as the fbx assets and scene files to their own (as per the org chart from page 1)



    From there, I went to the vertical slice, so I made a "MorrisonsOffice-master.ma" file, and I even kept that one relatively clean. Everything in environment art needs to be correctly sized relative to everything else, so I like to work in as few files as possible, but what that means is that the files internally need to be meticulously cleaned. (Maya dumps so much garbage nodes and empty groups and such). When it came time to model geometry for a high res normal map or duplicate a bunch of iterations of a prop from start to final, I'd usually just grab all the meshes when I was done, group them, name the group, and then hide the group. Then I can grab a duplicate of the final asset, name it proper, and place it in the scene to work with it. That way I can scroll through my outliner and see all my objects, as well as all the little hidden projects that happen around in the void.



    I can go back into those BAKE groups and grab high res geometry to use in future bakes or whatever. It worked really well.

    Unfortunately, when I shifted off of vertical slice and into production, I made a "Hallway-master.ma" file which became my main working file for a long time. I used it to model everything in the interior as well as blockin the skydome and get all my sizes correct, and the most organization I did was throwing certain collections of assets (ceilings, some walls, skydome geometry, etc) into layers so I can turn them off for visibilty. This file got huge, and I got lazy and stopped naming things. Then, one day, something happened while saving that file and it was suddenly rendered corrupt and I freaked out! I was texting a tech artist friend of mine who knew how to salvage maya files. What redeemed me was that I had been saving as Maya Ascii from the start as opposed to Maya Binary. If an MB gets corrupt, it's hosed, but if an MA goes wrong, you can open it with notepad and hopefully find what's wrong and fix it. 

    I was able to find where the corruption began and delete is and salvage most of my file, but I lost all of the materials that were in the file. Now, this isn't too big a deal since in the UE workflow all material application and such happens in-engine, and all of my UVs were still intact, but it was super annoying to come into my main master file and have everything be neon green missing textures and such.  That file has never run very well ever since and I definitely get more crashes than I did before. Dumb.

    Now that I've started rendering out the exterior, I've created an "Exterior-master.ma" file and I'm keeping that one clean like I did in the beginning. When I move on to the skydome, I'll be creating a Skydome-master as well. It really really pays to keep thing clean in there, even if it takes some work away from actually producing assets.  I think for me and the way I work, I really like to just work in 1 file as opposed to putting everything in their own files and referencing them in, but whatever is cleanest and works for you is good, as long as you're making those decisions at the start of the project and they're decisions that become Policy that you will keep to and work with.

    In short, 

    Do this:


    NOT THIS:


    :wink:
  • jStins
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    jStins interpolator
    @mutatedjellyfish Great work so far and excellent thread. 2017 was a drought in personal work for me (friction!) and this thread has really inspired me to get started on something for 2018. Thanks for sharing your process and the thoughtful write-ups. I appreciate that you're digging into the organization, planning and problem solving aspects of the project. I feel like discussion of these elements of production often get ignored (or passed over) for flashier or more technical aspects of a piece. Looking forward to seeing your progress!
  • mutatedjellyfish
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    mutatedjellyfish polycounter lvl 10
    @jStins Thank you! Man, life can be brutal. I remember reading a line in the book Art and Fear as a student that permanently changed my whole mindset. It said essentially that the job of an artist wasn't really to make art per se, but it was to "learn to work on your work". Taking that life stuff as it comes but refusing to let it bully you out of your dreams is a big journey I'm on currently, haha.

    In other news, I'm grateful for OWHQ to be featured on 80 Level today!


    https://80.lv/articles/overwatch-hq-creating-a-game-level-for-portfolio/


  • Turks
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    Turks polycounter lvl 9


    Do this:


    NOT THIS:


    :wink:
    This whole thread is incredible dude! Amazing work so far loving watching this. 

    Excuse the mega noob question ha, but how do you export your assets? Do you export the whole office for example as one mesh? Or export all its pieces and then reassemble in UE4, just copying the coords from maya? Or something else. Being pretty knew to game dev,  I've always struggled with the best way to deal with handling multiple meshes. 
  • Nuna
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    Nuna node
    Hey man really enjoying this thread. You inspired me to do something similar :D. In terms of level design, dont forget about respawn points and things like distance to the flag and cover etc. these things are essential for esports games :).

    Cant wait to see more.
  • mutatedjellyfish
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    mutatedjellyfish polycounter lvl 10
    @Turks Thanks! So I'm not sure if this is the best way or even the standard way, but I do a little bit of both. By default, UE4 will import an asset with its pivot point at Maya's origin.  If I'm exporting a prop that is bespoke or if it's a prop that I'll want to use in multiple places (boxes for example) then I have a button on my shelf that moves that object to 0,0,0 and I use Maya's export selected to Unreal option. If I'm exporting a piece of architecture like a wall or something that's not going to ever move anywhere else, then I'll just leave it in place and export it, that way when I'm in Unreal all I have to do is move it to 0,0,0 and it'll be where it needs to be.

    You definitely don't want to export a whole room or level as one because that won't play well with how Unreal assigns material groups to an asset. The more materials you have on a single object, the more expensive it is, so you really need to be mindful of how many separate materials you have on the object you're exporting. As such, it's probably cheaper to cut an object into a couple pieces with a few materials on each and export them in-place so they're aligned when moved to the origin than it is to combine it into 1 object but have a dozen materials on it, if that makes sense?

    @Nuna Thank you! And you are absolutely correct. If this were to be a real level, frankly speaking, it would need a whole new layout taking into account all of what you've laid out. As it is, though, I've made the call that since this is an art project, it's more made to look like it's a real level, but I also wanted to adhere to some of the layout in the Uprising comic, so I've tried to split the difference. I think my next project will be more of an actual, real layout level, though. The closer I get to something being actually playable the better I feel. :smile:
  • mutatedjellyfish
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    mutatedjellyfish polycounter lvl 10
    Hey, everyone! I'm working on some really base-level groundplane stuff on the terrace right now, and it's just a lot of modeling and fiddling with grass cards and the like, hence the scarcity of updates lately. If you check the Trello ( https://trello.com/b/PuUxNYXe/owhq ), look for the orange label called "WORKIN' ON IT" to see what task I'm currently up to.



    You'll also notice a lot of bespoke, story hook props on the task list, and I'm thinking about streaming myself making some of these if people would be interested. Probably Tuesday and Thursday nights or the like. My channel is here if you'd like to follow it and get notified when the streams go up

     https://www.twitch.tv/mutatedjellyfish 

     I know everyone and their dog streams, so these might just end up being me silently modeling by myself, but y'all can always watch the saved videos later, and if people do show up I'll be more than happy to talk about whatever people want to talk about in regards to art and art making, including my process, or staying sane, or whatever!
  • Tectonic
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    Tectonic polycounter lvl 10
    nice work! the grass is looking a little blue in hue, maybe give it a more similar tone to the vines/trees behind it? or just make the tips of the grass a bit warmer, that could work too.
  • Archsider
    amazing :O imo better than most of the ingame maps with their super saturated eye blinding contrast.
    I can rest my eyes on these scenes.
  • mutatedjellyfish
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    mutatedjellyfish polycounter lvl 10
    @Tectonic Right you are! The ambient light outside is blue tinted too, which makes it even more blue. Here's where it's at now:



    After fiddling with various material styles, vertex normals, and shadow options, the grass has landed there for now. I'm happy with how it looks in sun and shadow now, even though you can see the cards pretty well. The low angle of the sun casts really long shadows which doesn't help, haha. Let me know what y'all think!  Don't worry, the trees are all placeholder, so they'll change. They're a big hot mess for now.

    @Archsider Haha, thank you, goodness! I'll gratefully take the compliment even if I don't entirely agree. :wink:
  • mutatedjellyfish
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    mutatedjellyfish polycounter lvl 10
    Going live on Twitch in about 45 minutes. I'll be working on the Terrace. Come talk about art making, working in games, being unemployed, or your fear of tacos. 



    Aaaand done. I promise I wont make this thread into a place to post about streaming. Once I get a set schedule down, I'll just post it in the OP and be done with it. This was my first time streaming anything ever, though, so thanks for checking it out of you did! I didn't get much work done, but I sure talked a lot. ;)
  • CptAlbatross
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    CptAlbatross polycounter lvl 4
    I missed your stream, how's it going?
  • mutatedjellyfish
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    mutatedjellyfish polycounter lvl 10
    @CptAlbatross It's still going! I've been getting my regular stream up and running, for sure, and I've found that streaming requires a slightly different approach to art making than I might usually take. I've picked a specific story/prop-heavy area, Torbjorn's makeshift terrace workspace, and I'm building out all of the props that I'll need to set dress it on stream. Off stream, however, I'm working on the more mundane aspects which for now has primarily been building out trim transitions, grass planters, and grass elements on the terrace's groundplane:



    Another thing that has been stealing some of my time has been prepping for GDC! Given my employment situation, I've decided that this year would be a great time to go to GDC for my first time. I've always wanted to go, but now it makes sense, so if anyone is headed there as well and would like to talk, PM me or get in touch via some other means.

    Moving forward, off-stream, I'll be continuing to dress out the ground plane. The terrace has much more open, navigable space than the interior, which means I'll have to find my interest and variation along the ground as much as in the surrounding elements, so I'm thinking about things like a few dirt/grime decals, dropped pine needles, some light debris like papers, etc. From there, I desperately need to address the trees and railings and then the more bespoke props like the flags, exhibit pillars, and that infamous statue!

    As a reminder, here's the sketch of the Alpine Terrace:



    And for now, if anyone is interested, my stream will be up every Wednesday and Thursday night, starting at 9pm MST.

    Edit: Oh geez, I only just now noticed that putting a raw link to a twitch stream in your signature means an embedded stream window at the bottom of every one of your posts. I'm sorry, guys, that's super obnoxious.
  • mutatedjellyfish
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    mutatedjellyfish polycounter lvl 10
    So! It's been a bit of a while, but don't take that to mean I've been slackin' or that I'm not still dead-bloody-set on finishing this beast. On the contrary, while I've been distracted from the thread I've been clawing my way forward on OWHQ. So on to updates!

    First off, streams! I stream Wednesday and Thursday nights and I've dedicated the Torbjorn makeshift workspace out on the terrace to be my stream work and I'm starting to build some momentum there:



    Clockwise from left: Computer work station desk, computer server stacks, futuristic digital drafting table, workbench, toolbox, wheelie cart, storage boxes. The idea is Torb has dragged all of this equipment out onto the terrace to set up a makeshift workshop. I've also begun blocking in lots of the simpler-styled props and population that we'll need to really make this area feel used and lived-in. Not pictured yet is a man-shaped punching dummy that's been drafted to use as a mount for Mercy's damaged wingpack, which is what Torb has been working on repairing out here. The chat on stream helped me come up with a prop list for the space, and most recently, I've been setting up a simple texture atlas/material instance system in order to simplify and streamline the props and their production so hopefully we'll be able to make this feel pretty rich.  Also present are my newest stencil objects: spare papers.

    The stream is challenging for me in a lot of ways, but where I may lose speed, for example, I more than make up for it via the chat braintrust. Viewers (you know who you are!) have called me out on silly things I do wrong and taught me all kinds of new things, especially about UE4 and workflow. I've even had moments where I've stopped production to talk with chat about certain decisions and changed focus or method to better ideas that the viewers have. It's been suuuuper cool, and I'd be overjoyed to have more people tuning in to help. A lot of people work on their own projects while watching the stream, so come check it out! There's a link to it in my signature at the bottom of my posts.

    Off stream, and part of the reason I haven't posted much lately, I've been really grinding in on the terrace structure itself which has involved a lot of hand-placing grass cards (as shown above), trim decals on the floor, and bending railings around the perimeter. I've also worked a bunch on the main section of the terrace platform over by the statue which is our control point area. I split that area into smaller sections, and did a texturing/decal/detail pass to the metal plate floors in the corners. Also added a light strip trim and lighting to the space:







    As a side note, if you're wondering what went into the overall layout of the Terrace, I initially blocked in just a big giant open area, but I quickly realized how awful that was going to be. While brainstorming things that seemed inspirational of Overwatch, I remembered the World's Fairs that we used to do back mid-last-century. Their fairgrounds were my point of inspiration for how to layout my exterior playspace:





    And my result as it stands today:


    Obviously a completely different scale, but I tried to use similar pathing philosophies to break up the space, sightlines, and drive a player around the space. (By the way, that OW logo is legit just slapped on there and is temporary).

    Speaking of scale, that's the final thing I've been really focused on addressing. I got some very, very awesome feedback from a very kind and trusted source, and it cut straight to an issue that's been creeping in to the project more and more: scale.  One of the biggest culprits was the West Hallway. Here's an older screenshot:


    It will become obvious to probably most anyone when you look from the doorway to the blue rubber anti-fatigue mat, to the 'cables' that the scale here is WAY out of whack. Like, hilariously so. One of the biggest challenges I've had in this project from the beginning has been the question "How chunky?" How thick and exaggerated to I go? Lots of things in OW feel very voluminous and solid with exaggerated bevels and curves, but a lot of other things can get really intricate as well. This hallway is a great example of me trying and failing to serve both of those masters at once. It's fine to make things chunky and solid, and it's fine to go intricate, but everything that shares the same physical space needs to play well relative to each other or it all falls apart.

    Another exacerbating factor here is that I've been putting my prop list off until after I finish the architecture. Looking at the above screenshot, there's not a whole lot of things in that you or I could have encountered in our actual irl lives, right? I know doorways, but I have no idea how big sci-fi doorways should be. I have no idea how big those lights are or what size those pipes should be. There's no anchoring, instantly recognizable objects in the scene at all so even if the scale was accurate, the viewer's brain would still be at a loss. The closest thing I have in this shot is that anti-fatigue rubber mat, and it happens to be the worst scale offender in the shot AND it's in the extreme foreground, emphasizing the effect. Yikes.

    SO I've been working on a scale pass. You may have noticed a Commader Morrison model in an earlier shot. I was able to find a copy of him online and I brought him into the space to help reset my scale. I've resized various elements throughout the level and I've begun adding some initial props; very obvious, recognizable props, to the space. Here's the after:


    I feel it's moving in the right direction now. I may do some other things, for example the white PVC pipes are gigantic. I may shrink them in size, but add more of them, for example. Please do feel free to nitpick me on this. I can't guarantee I'll be able to resize everything but I've also been looking at these spaces for so long that my eyes gloss over a lot these days. Feedback and critique is invaluable!

    Here's another area that benefits, even just using the same props again:


    Finally, another distraction that's kept me away from the thread is GDC! I'll be attending GDC for the first time this year. I had these snazzy business cards printed up with some familiar artwork:


    If you're going to GDC and you'd like to get in touch with me, feel free to message me here! I'm looking to meet new people and start to get a feel for my next career moves, so let's talk!

    In the meantime, I'm getting back into a groove on the project again after some distractions and some more tedious tasks, so things are moving forward. Hit me up and check out the streams if you're interested!
  • jStins
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    jStins interpolator
    Good call on the scale pass. It definitely helps sell the space and make it believable. One thing that helps me is to get three levels of scale anchors in a space early on. Having primary (architecture), secondary (props) and tertiary (debris) in a space gives more visual landmarks to assess scale and, depending on the degree which debris is appropriate, can help drive the composition of the space (i.e., small details to lead the eye to a focal point). I'm not sure if it fits the Overwatch aesthetic, but maybe try adding some small debris elements to the space as well (even something like the soda can from your commissary space as a stop-gap).

    Other than that, the only thing that still stands out to me scale wise in the second shot is the red handle near the 'No Access' blue door. It seems too big (granted some of the Overwatch characters have pretty meaty mits so maybe it works in context of the Overwatch universe).

    Cool to see the update and have fun at GDC!
  • Elaisu
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    Elaisu polycounter lvl 4
    Hello! Awesome thread and really great work done! I'm pretty new to this forum (and to be honest to whole environment development) so i apologize if its not very valuable that i'm going to say.... Just couple of thoughts about overall feeling of textures in Overwatch in comparison to your project.
    In Overwatch textures look very clean  - there is not much (if any at all) of small sharp noise from dirt and grime in there. If we see some destruction, sctraches etc  its midsized or pretty big in size and if  there is any dirt it looks very smooth and gentle. Also they like to use bright and clean colors everywhere and not too many of different "base" colors at the same time. We see balanced and considered color schemes - blue and yellow, yellow and orange, pink and blue, brown and green and so on. And colored lights often help to achive it. I included some screenshots to describe better what i'm trying to say. 
    Once again - great thread, thank you for sharing and sorry if i'm saying something too obvious!

  • sybrix
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    sybrix polycounter lvl 12
    Good call on the scale cues and adjustments. Scale is always tough for me too. Even when I put a scale reference in there I tend to make things way too big. Looking forward to more updates and one of these days I'll tune into the stream.... one of these days lol.
  • mutatedjellyfish
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    mutatedjellyfish polycounter lvl 10
    @jStins Thanks! Oh, the 3 levels of scale thing is a great idea. I'm beginning to build population at a smaller scale as well, so that should help. That darn red handle, you're totally right. I figure I need to not only shrink it a bit but also back off from that bright LOOK AT ME red.

    @Elaisu Thank you so much! You're right. Overwatch textures definitely have a lot of hand-painted information in them, but the primary read is always color first, so much of that detail is allowed to disappear in favor of the overall scene composition, especially from a mid- to long-distance. Thanks for the feedback!

    @sybrix Yeah, there's just something about the Maya viewports that short circuit my brain when it comes to scale. Getting the references in there has helped a ton. 

    As for the stream, if anyone hasn't seen the stream and has any questions or feedback for the environment, come join!


  • fearian
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    fearian greentooth
    This has been a really cool project to follow!

    My biggest issue with the shots your posting right now is the overall readability and noise of them. At first, I wanted to place the blame for this on your screenspace AO, but that's not quite it. So I took some of your shots into photoshop and looked at them without color and alot of different offenders raised their heads.

    You have your screen-space AO, you have bloom, you have deep shadows and you have metallic materials all contributing to blowing out your blacks and whites. but I don't want to talk about any of that.

    You made me really want to just get into Value Ranges. So, with apologies:


    Here's the image I started with:



    So when we look at just the value of the shot, it makes it easier to call out problematic areas. For me, the big issue is the amount of very dark grey bumping up against middling values and chopping up the picture in a way that doesn't help define the volume of the space. Instead it helps define the assets it surrounds. It's a classic environment art mistake where you want to call out the solid assets you made, but the scene suffers as a result.

    I feel like when you re-lit some of these scenes in the past, you where probably aware of this advice and you didn't shy away from making parts of the scene dark, in order to give the overall scene more character, and call out lighter areas. This is good iteration - but it's not there yet. 

    What we are left with is dark areas of the image that still feel cluttered; the flat surfaces of meshes are in shadow, and the contact shadows between props is pushed darker still to almost pure black. Meanwhile lighter areas have a tendency to blow out, and when these blow outs happen next to dark areas, like in the background of the image above, we get the full value range across a small visual area. All of these contrast points compete for our attention. Finally, the super-dark contact shadows break up the scene in a way that isn't relevant to the space, but to the props they are contacting with.

    One of the worst contributors to this is the shiny metal surfaces: black and white values combined. When I looked into how blizzard managed their values, I think they might have had the same issue with metal surfaces, but have cleverly side stepped it. I'll come back to that.

    Uh, part 2 I guess:


    Lets Look at some screenshots from Overwatch maps that seem closest to your style goal:


    So right off the bat there's a clear difference, but just seeing the goal is not particularly useful or we'd all be perfectly nailing our art ever time we opened artstation for ideas. ;)

    My first thought is, while the values here might look super clean and crunched, there's probably some post processing happening in the game like UE4's tonemapper that crushes the blacks and softens the highlights. So lets accept that as a final tweak you can apply and move on to the more subtle solutions.

    *break to get a beer*

    So we know value is important in art, but I feel like the application of value in environment art is often mishandled. Back in the day, you didn't have normal maps and you painted light directly into your model. This led to problems when your model got lit, not just because the lighting might not line up with the shadows you painted, but because if you painted a white highlight there was no way the light could make it brighter. The solution is to paint your values around a middle range and give your lightest values somewhere to go when they get hit directly by a GoldSrc Engine spotlight.

    But the year is now and we do have normal maps. And you are controlling the lighting in this environment! You can plan what you want your values to be, and where they go when the light hits them. You can still leverage the idea of working within a value range to create great composition.

    What I mean by this is... think about how you can break apart the space of the level into separate value groups that identify the key large shapes in your design. (Your plaza concepts, by the way, are killer). While this can be a design detail (like the floor logo), it's more important that you are describing the volumes of the environment this way. Lean into the level design aspect of environment art because lighting is maybe closer to level design than env art in this regard.

    Below I've slapped a surface blur on Nepal and your shot from before:



    what I see from the Nepal shot, is clear zones. The ground and the steps. demarking walkable space is key in environments. Obviously players can figure out where they should and should not be able to walk anyway, but you want to offload as much of that thinking from them as possible, and make it intuitive. Most of design advice is like this. It's not about can they figure it out, it's more about making it so obvious that there is no figuring to be done. 

    Wait where was I, uh, the floor! and then the Buildings, with a subtle but readable breaking up between the building's shape and the decorations that give it a unique identity. Let's dive into that - back to photoshop!



    So I've marked the values from my blurred image on the gradient to the right. And then slapped those values next to each other so you can see the contrast they have with each other. The values have enough contrast with each other to be able to describe the identity of a building, but they only occupy 10% of the value range! I know this blurred ass image barely represents the original screenshot but I hope it makes the point clear.

    We don't need to see a full value range from black to white in the same way you don't need to use every color in the palette to paint a landscape. You add detail within contrast to provide interest, but that detail can happen at a level of contrast subtle enough that it doesn't demand your attention. When that detail is demanding your attention at the same volume as the very structure of the space it sits in, things get noisy.

    I'm really running the risk of muddling though what other people have described much better. To be honest I have typed this out in a stream of consciousness and I'm not sure if this will be useful to you specifically.


    So let me wrap this up with some potential solutions of the top of my head:

    • Overwatch uses baked lighting with lots of bounce light to fill out dark areas. If you want to stick with dynamic lighting, try placing fake bounce lights to even out shadowed areas.
    • Kill the super shiny metal. Overwatch puts the shiny metal materials outside in light environments. This sticks with the idea of working within value ranges - outdoor areas hand handle the high value.
    • Side note: their metal seems stylised in that it seems to reflect  colored cubemaps and rarely peaks the white value. Not sure how to match this.
    • Tone down your bloom, and move away from such a strong, low sun angle.
    • Tone down your SSAO


    Finally - while I was looking into this, every single screenshot from an artist who worked on the project has a super high Field of View. Overwatch is a FPS and part of being an FPS is experiencing the game with an 80+ FOV. I'm certain the maps where designed with this in mind. 

    sorry for rambling. Hope this helps someone...
  • mutatedjellyfish
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    mutatedjellyfish polycounter lvl 10
    @fearian Ok wow! This is amazing. I've received some notes in the recent past about the lighting and how rudimentary it is too; you're definitely on point here. In my professional work, I did a lot with modular environments and player-generated content and as a result my lighting experience has definitely been lacking! The greyscale approach is genius and something that is actually built in to UE but I constantly forget about those tools. I would love to take this feedback (and other lighting feedback I've gotten) and put together a plan of action and do a focused lighting pass to really try to dial things in and then do a proper follow up post to your feedback above. It may take a while, but I'll put it in my tasks. Thank you soooo much, this is great! 

    I think you really nailed some things that have been bugging me visually, especially about the interior, but I'm solidly in that space where it's getting hard for me to see the forest for the trees.

    As for the FOV, people who watch the streams can attest, whenever I test the level I always set the FOV to 100 before I run around. That doesn't come through in the regular camera view that I use to take screenshots, though. I should look into how to set that default FOV.
  • mutatedjellyfish
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    mutatedjellyfish polycounter lvl 10
    Hey! It's been a hot minute since I've been making progress on this (for REASONS!) but I'm gonna dip back into it on livestream which I'm picking back up on this year! I'm gonna go live in about an hour here:

    We're gonna talk about environment art in general and stuff I've been thinking about and learning since I last streamed last year. I'll also do some portfolio/project/whatever critiques/feedback towards the end if people come and want!

    Anyway, back to it!
  • mutatedjellyfish
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    mutatedjellyfish polycounter lvl 10
    Streamin' again! (Probably the last bump I'll get away with, lol :wink: )
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