Abandoned Cave - Stylized Game Environment

Hi guys,
I want to share with you my latest project. It is still very deep in progress, but I think it’s interesting for the one or the other. I’ll will post almost everyday other shots and my progress so far.

I hope you like it.
Anyway - currently I am a bit in a hurry. The next days I’ll post a bit more informations.

THUMBNAIL:



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Okay, some more informations.

Long time I was just a 3d/game enthusiast doing 3d art in my spare time. Aside this I am a student at a school for graphic design with the focus on typography and corporate design and most of the students are pretty happy with this. Of course - they decided to study it … and there are me and few others who specialize on ‘digital media’ or what is called here at school hypermedia ~

Short story long - I will do my bachelor thesis in (game) environment art.
I want to share my process with you and I hope you’ll find it informative. Please feel free to critique me.

This environment is focused on exploring. Later on I’ll add a lot of little gameplay stuff, like quizes, logs and tiny plattformer parts.




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Tomorrow I’ll show you the favelas :smiley:
…or on sunday^^




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The beginning of the residential district - highly work in progress.
Some big assets are still missing and a lot of debris and textures.




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No replies yet? :confused: This is cool stuff!

It feels like it needs a few more gaps throughout the “level” for natural light to shine through, just to balance things out (or at least some other areas of significant color contrast to draw player interest; I think a bright green glow would fit nicely somewhere in the scene).

For such a large area, I think you’re off to a great start with variety; it already feels like an exploratory game level, rather than a bunch of repeating assets (which is more than I can say for a lot of the “AAA” games I see my brothers playing these days :rolleyes: ).

As a 3D platformer nostalgia lord, I give this a thumbs up. :yes:

Thanks :smiley:
And I hope it will be even cooler in 6 month ^^

There is alread a ‘lot’ of natural light in there. In total 5 giant holes - but at the moment you can’t see it that well - in the future I’ll add lightshafts and fog to enhance this feeling a lot. I hope this will be engough - otherwise I add some openings here and there.

And the lighting will get a complete overhaul someday. This is more or less the work light to get the right mood, but it’s planned to put a whole month into proper lighting.

Thanks for your interest!


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Love the atmosphere! Have you put much thought into where the ambient light is coming from? It may be well worth your while to just put a little thought into that. Right now it just looks like the air itself glows a little, and I don’t know if that’s what you’re going for.
It sure is useful for sight, though.

Thanks for your kind words, but could you explain it a bit further?
Before you do, I’ll explain what I’ve did.

The fog is right now a ‘solid’ gradient of four different colors. Usally the atmosphere tint the color with a single color, but I decided to go a more stylized way. Actually these colors aren’t adjusted aswell - this will be a task for the finish.
As said, it’s just a solid color. I will add some fog cards here and there and some sun beams, but the main goal in mind is to have thick air. Later on all shaders get a additional material function to fade into solid color as the camera goes further away.

Today I worked on the station assets - did some texture work and placed some assets here and there.
(Accidentally forgot to hide the editor icons)




Today was a really miserable day. Nothing worked, because sometimes the blender exporter is just a … well~

Spend for a 5 minute task 2/3 hours, because the exporter decided to export wrong data. This happens from time to time and I do not know why. Anyway. The wall texture is now in place and I did some little pepples.



Nothing fancy today. Just sculpted rocks and the entrance textures are done (building and the steps).






the jpeg compression of this board is really hardcore _

Some progress at the station.
Still no post process so far.




This is cool. There seems to be an element of sci-fi encroaching on a residential world, at least in the first few shots (there seems to be massive forerunner-ish pillars). Really enjoying the lighting, keep updating! Is there some background lore for this environment?

Hello Kelthor,
i am glad you’d like my work and progress so far and you are absolutly right with the ‘massive forerunner-ish pillars’. For the sci-fi elements I oriented on the halo look and feel and some other architectural styles. The lighting is one of my hardest enemy so far - I want it to be dark and mystical, but the readabilty gets lost at the moment and I look for a way to improve this. Maybe more lightshafts from above to get more bouncing light.

The residential area is now the one who getx build, so I think there will come a lot of updates here and there an I plan to make some breakdowns for you guys. Maybe someone is interested in.

And yes, there is a lore, but I will explain this later.
In further updates you’ll see a painted wall with the rough story on it - I did not want to spoil this, because the whole environment is made to be explored and to get a story of this place and beyond.

I changed the color palette of my scene and now, for my taste, it looks a lot better. What do you think?
I also added a lot of new stuff, but for now I show you the vegetable bed and the peeled wall texture.




Sorry for the really late response. As your latest two images show really clearly, the background appears to be mixed with a kind of light blue, lighter than more or less everything in the foreground except for lamps. This does give a stylized look, but combine the saturation and the brightness of the blue, with the fact that it’s a linear mix and not a multiplicative filter, this makes it look like a glowing blue fog, almost bioluminescent.

I would decrease the brightness of the blue. It’ll also give a better dynamic range to your image, increasing the focus on the foreground of the image and better balancing the color palette, without changing the stylized feel. Right now, the two major colors are about 50/50 in strength, which is a big no-no in color theory.

No problem at all and this is a really great advice. Thanks for that - I try to reduce the lightness in my blues, but it isnt that easy, because my colored fog solution isn’t so responsive. When I change the values, I get complete other values and it’s a lot of fiddeling around.

Get a nice dynamic range is my goal in the long run.

Anyway - especially today, I’ve worked on the First Person Blueprint to get a more advanced look + surface sensitve sounds.
OBS crumbled the quality, so everything get a bit dull and blurry, but for demonstration purposes, it works for now. Still deep work in progress - proof of concept.