Joshua Llorente did a little overview of his production of the wonderful Overwatch-inspired environment.
Joshua Llorente did a little overview of his production of the wonderful Overwatch-inspired environment.
Introduction
Hi, my name is Joshua Llorente and I’m 19 years old. I’m currently studying Fine Arts Major in Advertising but I really like creating environments rather than creating advertisements. Also I’m a self-taught 3D Artist and currently working as an intern in a game dev company here in the Philippines: The Studio of Secret 6, Inc.
Scene
This environment is done for practicing my efficiency in level design, I tried to create an environment within the duration of 4 days and this is the product of it. Regarding with the design aspect, this environment is influenced by the art style of Overwatch, because I want the assets to have a strong and clean silhouette to be able to achieve the stylized look I’m aiming for.
In creating an environment I don’t usually have a concrete concept about it, I usually start with one asset and then I start to create another piece that fits with the existing one. I think this process helps me to improve my design skill with the assets I’m making.
Assets
The environment structure is mainly composed of only 12 assets, this is because I want to reuse the assets as much as possible since this is just a speed level design. The meshes are very simple and low-poly because I want it to be optimized since it will be used a couple of times in the scene.
In the asset production, I created all my assets in 3ds Max, I tried to create a very low-poly asset with a clean silhouette.
In creating the base of my structure including large walls and floors. I’m using BSP, I like to use it because it is flexible and you can directly edit the polygons and the UV rotation and scale inside the editor also you can assign materials to each of its faces. And after setting up the base, I now decorate it with different modular assets that I created.
Materials
All of my assets are textured using Substance Painter, the textures are flat and simple. I’m only using 3 maps exported from substance painter for most of my assets: Diffuse, (Metallic/rough/ao, compressed in rgb channel), and normal. I like using very simple and clean textures because it gives a stylized look that I want.
The process of my material creation in Substance Painter:
Environment Effects
There is no special post-processing effects in this scene, For the dust and wind effect, I’m only using the existing steam particle inside UE4, I just tweaked the color, velocity, and size to match it with the environment.
Conclusion
The environment doesn’t really have a structure for navigation and level playability, I created this for environment design and composition only, But the assets are optimized enough to be used in a game environment, also since the assets are all modular and low-poly it will run good on large environments.