Museum Heist

It's the first week of real Third Year Game Art. It's scary. The projects are tough and the expectations are high. The project I've started this week has been one of the themed proffesional briefs designed by actual gaming companies. We can choose them from several styles and what exactly we want to work on, which is pretty cool. I chose to work on a Realistic Environment, something I dont often work on. I thought it would be good to improve on this skill to add to my portfolio.

The project itself is to create a rooftop scene for a third person shooter game, specifically set in New York, and I quickly came up with the idea of setting it during a musuem hiest. I thought it would give my level some nice flair and somewhere to start from. I had this idea to have this lit up from below traingular sunroof lighting up the area from the beginning and really wanted to keep that in.

First I made several moodboards about rooftops in New York and various other things.

I only spent about a day and a half concepting, just some quick work to make sure I had my ideas secured.

These are just two of my rough concepts, I didn't want to focus too long on them. I just built as much as I needed to be able to hopefully not drift too far from my idea and something to work from. I quickly headed towards building the level. At first I was slightly worried about my idea being too simple and boring but when I started working I realised there is actually a lot of work to do. I do have to make a New York skyline with buildings and skyscrapers around this after all.

This was my first very simple whitebox, which was more to test sizes more than anything. This is so I could see how the player character would actually move and how big they would be in the environment.

I'm really happy with the floor texture I worked up. It's light and parts of it should shine and capture the light. As I'm setting this level at night I want the small amount of main light to be bright and bounce around the enrivonment properly.

Usually I dont use realistic textures but I'm quite happy with how this turned out. The actual colours and design of things works very well. Although it did turn out I reversed my normal maps, and also at first I wasn't happy with them.

To make the normal map better I spent over an hour painting them in by hand. The end result is much nicer than the last one, but this is mostly because the normals are now the right way round.

I'm quite happy with how far I managed to get in this almost week. I originally had planned to have a raised extention part of the building, reusing textures I had already made. Good in theory but I think it might look stupid in practice. So for now that idea is shelved for more important things. In the next week I'm going to work on creating the other rooftop assets. Air ventilation systems which always are on gaming rooftops and heisting gear is required. Right now the level looks really empty and barely like a rooftop, but hopefully when I throw some assets on there and populate the level it will look like I intend it to.

#GameArt #Rooftop