Village Takeover

Team Mickey-Is-Pissed
Art Institute of Los Angeles - Santa Monica
Project Lead

This project began as an assignment for my class in the Art Institute. Our goal was to build an environment in Unreal with a team. We design our own concept, set our own art direction, and complete our goal in 11 weeks. The team consisted of Betty Rubio, Ramiro Trevino, Javier Araiza, and myself. Betty set the tone of the entire environment by stylizing a design for the castle and houses. She also helped produce a majority of our props such as the ladder, lantern, bucket, broom, wooden cart, trees, and other assets. Ramiro modeled the houses and drew up all of our tileable textures, which was used for all the ground textures, house textures, and castle textures. Javier built the entire castle wall, statues and doors, and the two towers on the side. I was responsible for the level art, lighting, materials, kismet and the ground and mountain models. The story is that this once peaceful medieval village is suddenly destroyed by Hell. Satan’s castle erupts through the ground and an entire portion of the village sinks into the swirling lava!

We started off with some rough sketches being created to set up a layout. The style we decided on was a stylized world inspired by games like World of Warcraft and Fable/Fable 2. Strong silhouettes was my main focus. The castle itself was even completely back-lit just because I wanted it to be a pure silhouette. The houses were curved and pointy, which gave off really strong exaggerated feel. Even the lighting for the castle wall was made so that it faded to black at the top, in order to try and capture this ‘out of this world’ look and feel. Once nearly all the modeling and texturing was completed and all the assets placed in level, their tasks were pretty much completed during the last 2 weeks. Then came my share of the assignment; making it look pretty. Thanks to the help of Ramiro, all the textures worked wonderfully with each other. His floor tileable texture (the stone path) is so awesome, I tiled it even more than I originally planned just to show it off.

I wanted something extra special for this level, so two light set ups were created to give it two different looks: one based on a rainy day look and the other a hell-fire tone. Unreal could handle a single light set up if you build the lights and shadows into the textures. The problem with two light set ups was deciding what would be built and what would be dynamic lights that would toggle on and off through kismet. I ended up with a single ‘sun’ light direction that created strong shadows that cut through the level’s large, flat, ground. The trees that Betty modeled broke the shadows up very nicely. This was baked into the textures while both the ‘daytime’ lighting and the ‘red-hot-hell’ lighting were done through toggleable spotlights/point lights that lasted on static and dynamic objects. The kismet mostly consisted of two branches. One branch toggled on all the lights that were used for the day time setting. A majority of the village that would sink into the lava were visible. The moment the second branch activated, all those houses and assets were toggled to be hidden, the floor geometry sinks into the lava by becoming kActors and falling through the scene as physics objects, and the lights for daytime toggle off while the lights for hell toggle on. The castle and castle wall were matinee animated to pop up through the floor and explode out into the world when Hell gets switched on. This was done through grouping the main elements of the castle together then giving them a simple movement track to rise up through the floor. This being only my second experience using kismet (my first being the Goliath project), the animation was rough, but it got the job done, and the particles help draw attention a bit from it. This project is something that I will always be proud of because of the group I worked with. Without their help, their willingness to actually follow my direction, but to also give input and ideas and not be afraid to set their own artistic styles, this project would have sunk faster than the village itself. It was joy to learn from them and to teach them tips and tricks to pull this project together.