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.

Blitz, a new intense round-based game mode brings a different type of maps. A very circular flow of Deathmatch is not the case here and artists have to experiment with environments. A map called ‘Fort’ will be one of the first maps to test Blitz. There is a new interview with Epic Games Concept Artist, Adam Wood, on Unreal Tournament blog about the concepts and the challenges behind this map.

It appears that the artist had to face some challenges while designing the new map – he found out that realistic looking environments tend to blend everything together.

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

Join discussion

Comments 0

    You might also like

    We need your consent

    We use cookies on this website to make your browsing experience better. By using the site you agree to our use of cookies.Learn more