Unreal Tournament’s Blitz: Improving Readability of Maps
A new interview with Epic Games Concept Artist, Adam Wood, from UT’s blog about the concepts and the challenges behind ‘Fort’ map.
It looks great, but it can cause bad depth and readability issues. I explored ways to separate silhouettes from the background. The best broad solution we found was to apply a gradient to the material in certain areas. At different heights the shapes will pop, but it doesn’t work in all cases.
Epic Games Concept Artist, Adam Wood
The team had to introduce gradients, keeping in mind some questions:
The introduction of the gradients raised a few questions for us since we have a realistic style with PBR (Physically-based rendering) and can’t just throw crazy colors on the walls without it looking out of place. The answers kept leading towards an alien look, so it seemed like a good opportunity to add some Unreal flavor with ancient alien tech/architecture and to possibly reference existing races from the UT universe.
Epic Games Concept Artist, Adam Wood
Make sure to read the full article here.
