Stone Circle Scene Progress - March 1st

I've made more progress on my Stone Circle scene, including adding hand-painted tileable terrain textures, with normal, roughness and specular maps. I've also done some work on the particle effects to get the fire looking how I want it to look, and I've learned a bit about particles in the process. I got some feedback from Jim today on the scene and he seems to approve of how its going so far! Here's some pictures...

Firstly, here's the diffuse and normal maps for the tileable textures. I checked out a few hand-painted texture tutorials to help me with these and picked up some new Photoshop skills, which is always handy! I used the nDo plugin to generate normal maps from the diffuses. I've also done roughness and specular maps for each material.

And here's the current scene itself. It's very dark right now as I've been playing with the idea of having a dark environment to add a sense of danger and uncertainty to the exploration. I've altered the UE4 first-person character so that the character holds a torch complete with light and particle effects instead of a gun. My theory is that the darker the scene is overall, the more impact the torches scattered around the level will have. A dark scene will also give more opportunities to use object silhouettes for dramatic effect.

As it stands right now, I'm just steadily getting together all of the art/visual assets that I need. In the next few days I will be doing a bunch of trees, foliage, rocks and so on.

Stone Circle Scene Progress - February 27th

I've made a bit of progress on my new 3D environment project today. Having completed a basic level layout last week, I have now translated the layout into a terrain for the level, added some textures and put some trees down. I've also started playing with lighting by adding torches, setting the scene to night time and adjusting the fog. I think that this is a decent start.

At the moment all of the models are works-in-progress (the torch, for instance, is just a cylinder with a point light and particle emitter), and the materials are all just taken from the starter content, but this has helped me to visualise the scene and will allow me to move forward from this point to adding my own assets.

My next step will probably be to create my own tileable textures for the terrain, and maybe do some basic models for the three trees that will feature in the level's gameplay. Watch this space for updates!

Ilkley Moor Research Trip

So last week, I was not required to attend uni due to a Berlin trip taking place that many of the students and staff of the Design school attended, so we had a bit of an unofficial reading week, and we were encouraged to go on some trips to aid our research. (This also meant I wasn't able to do a Spontaneous Sunday this week as I was too busy, but it will return next week!).

As my new 3D environment project focuses on stone circles, I decided to take this as an opportunity to go and see one with my own eyes, and I set to work researching stone circles that I could visit. I soon discovered that a stone circle called the Twelve Apostles exists on Ilkley Moor in West Yorkshire. This is not far from my girlfriend, Chloe's, hometown, which was handy because it meant we could go and visit her family during the free week and also go and see the stone circle. It all worked out very well!

I printed out a route and some maps that we could follow to reach the Twelve Apostles stone circle ,and Chloe and I got the train to Yorkshire on Wednesday. We went on our trip to Ilkley on Saturday.

Here's some info about the Twelve Apostles stone circle:

"The Twelve Apostles is a stone circle near Ilkley and Burley in Wharfedale in West Yorkshire, England. The Twelve Apostles consists of the remains of a stone circle with a diameter of about 15 metres. The circle originally had between 16 and 20 stones, but it is now reduced to 12 stones. The stones are made from the local millstone grit. All of the stones were fallen by the mid-20th-century and were lying loose upon the ground. At the centre of the circle was a small mound, which may have been the disturbed remains of a burial cairn.

In 1971 a group of amateurs made an unauthorised attempt to re-erect the fallen stones, but the stones soon fell again. The stones have since been re-erected.It is not clear who re-erected them, nor when. The site suffers severe visitor erosion, as it was formerly hidden beneath heather, but is now in an area of bare trampled soil. It is regarded as one of the most damaged prehistoric sites in West Yorkshire."

- Wikipedia entry on the Twelve Apostles

Before getting the train to Ilkley.

We approached the Moor from the North, from the centre of Ilkley where the train station is located. Our walk would take us up the northern approach, past the White Wells cafe located on the ascent, and up some stone steps before reaching the top of the ascent and the Moor proper. We would then walk south across the Moor to the stone circle. We saw lots of interest stuff along the way including Victorian graffiti carved into rocks, cairns, streams, and some nice views of the Yorkshire countryside and towns such as Ilkley and Bradford.

White Wells cafe on the ascent to the Moor.

Victorian Graffiti

After about two hours of walking, we arrived at the stone circle itself. It lies about 380 metres above sea level, and its location offered amazing views. We had been able to see very far for pretty much all of the walk, but the views from the circle itself seemed to be the most impressive of them all. The location also felt like the spot that was most exposed to the elements. It was very windy and it began to hail soon after we arrived at the stones.

Twelve Apostles is not the most impressive stone circle that one can visit, and it has been heavily affected by human activity and interference, but it was still very cool to see a real example of what I had been researching for the past two weeks. I took a moment to take in the sights and try and place myself in the viewpoint of the ancient people who will had placed the stones there. This experience will hopefully help me to pinpoint the feeling that I want to evoke from the atmosphere of my 3D environment.

Making our way back down to Ilkley...

Our trip to Ilkley Moor to see the Twelve Apostles stone circles was a really fun and insightful experience. I think that seeing a stone circle in person, and the pictures that I took, will help me with my environment art project.

There's a load more pictures of our trip over on Imgur, check them out by clicking here!

Stone Circles & Druids - Starting Work On My Next Environment...

The 2nd Semester of my MA Games Design course is now well under-way, and while I have been keeping myself busy so far with learning to use the UE4 sequencer, dabbling with character modelling, and learning to use UE4 blueprints, its now time to get to work on my main body of work for the semester!

My next project will, of course, be another 3D environment. Over the last week or so, I have conducted extensive idea generation, gathered research materials and visual references and drawn up some sketches for my next environment.

Sticking with my historical themed environments, I wanted to do something involving stone circles and prehistoric megaliths from the Neolithic and Bronze Ages. This is an area of history that I've never looked into before and I've never looked this far back in time - I soon realised that concrete facts are very hard to come by and a lot of the history of this period is based upon theories.

I began to look into the uses of stone circles with the aim of making a scene involving Celtic Druids, and discovered that stone circles and megaliths actually predate the arrival of Druids to the British Isles by several hundred years. Luckily there is evidence that Druids used them for rituals, even if they did not build them themselves. This also allows me to take a bit of artistic license, so I may add some sort of mythical/fantasy angle.

I have eventually decided to create a scene set in a forest in Iron Age Britain (approx. 800 BC to 43 BC), with the player taking on the role of a Celtic Druid who must gather a branch from 3 different symbolic trees from Celtic mythology - Oak, Ash and Hawthorn - and light a fire with them in the middle of a stone circle. This is an interpretation of a Celtic festival/ritual called Beltaine, which involved the lighting of fires on the Eve of May Day to mark the start of Summer and offer symbolic protection to cattle and crops. I'm also going to include interactable stones that offer historical information to make it an interactive learning experience.

This will be my first scene involving gameplay, and I hope to employ all of my skills including using UE4's sequencer and Blueprints, 3D modelling, texturing, environment art, audio and music composition. My plan is to spread this project over semesters 2 and 3 so I can really make it as good as it can be. 

I have created a Pinterest board of reference images which can be seen by clicking here.

Here's some pictures of my rough sketches:

And a couple of books that I withdrew from the library.

I've also made a quick level block-out in Maya to help myself visualise the level scale and layout. The level will be a cross shape, with the stone circles located in the centre and a tree in each of the smaller offshoots. The longest offshoot is where the player starts.

Stay tuned for more updates on this new project!