BGP Art – First Official Week of Exploring Wind

And so it begins! Time to dust off the ol’ blog and start typin’! 

For BGP I’ll be working as an environmental artist and help with the level design for the game Exploring Wind, so I have mostly been researching our art style, deciding on a workflow and starting work on assets for the game but not really implementing them since the levels are not done yet. 

Our game will take place in an environment similar to the Zhangjiajie National Park in China with tall pillars and mountains covered in forest, but with a touch of fantasy to them. This means that most of our assets will be organic models like trees, rocks, etc. 

Our motto for this project is “Keep it simple” and since I’m the only one in charge of the environmental art (creating the 3D assets and dressing the level) we decided on a minimalistic style which offers us the chance to create  assets quickly. To keep to the minimalistic style I often ask myself; What is the  minimum amount of detail I have to put in to this asset while still maintaining it recognizable? For example; The texture of a birch tree would only need a white background with a few black spots for the player to recognize the tree. 

A way for us to create these simple textures is to use the Cutout filter in Photoshop

This gives us the chance to use photo textures and give them a minimalistic look fairly quickly and we do not have to paint all of our textures by hand. 

As for the models, we try to go by the same principles; No micro details, keep it simple. 

During the week I have also started to learn SpeedTree, which is a new software to me. I played around with the lighting in UE4 to see what could work in our game environment and finally tried to get a grip of UE4’s broken LOD system. I’ll probably write more about all of this in future posts! 

As of now, I haven’t had too many problems, disregarding the standrard confusion brought from new software, which meant that I could get going right away from the start. 

But here comes a few screenshots of my little playground in UE4. Here is where I have been tweaking the lighting, importing the assets and explored SpeedTree’s functionalities.