#starboltprojects

[starboltmodels]

FEZ - Industrial Area Remix

A Hybrid environment, based on the industrial hub area from Polytron's FEZ. My second go at producing an environment. This was made for Msc Advanced Environment Design and Research.

Down below this is a little look into how it's been built.

I don't pretend to know of any principles of stylisation. The aesthetic and workflow was paved as I translated the voxel environment. So for example,  all of the repeatable geometry is built to fit inside a 1mx1m space, because that's how I translated the pixel tiles to 3D space. I used snap settings appropriate to those units too. Later down the line, when the outliner grew crowded, I also built actor blueprints for clustered meshes such as the cables, the piping and other portions of the structure.

All of the materials derive their Normal maps and Ambient Occlusion either from trim sheets or combined UV maps, and they derive their colours and PBR from 3Vectors and Scalar paramaters rather than baked albedo/roughness/metalness. The details were grouped together based on their repetition in the level. The first trim sheet can be applied to over 70% of the level assets without changing anything except for colour or other scalar values. The final component in the master material is a mask, which gets used with linear interpolation to allow for a secondary set of values.

Masks play a key role in the whole aesthetic. The pixel style uses very spartan colour scheming; gradients, blending and grunge barely exist, but almost all of the tiles have an apparant primary and secondary material, which the masks are built as such to emulate. They denote differing areas of colour, opacity, emissiveness, roughness, metalness, even wear to apply additional normal data etc. The blueprint is simple but very easy to iterate with.

The resulting Material Instance is incredibly flexible. Every object in this environment, except for vegetation employs this master material in instanced capacities. It's also given me the chance to play around with making my own material functions. Amongst what I've made are -

Functionality to manually adjust texture coordinates in the Instances

Functionality which handles the masking of the 3Vectors outside to the master material, streamlining the main workspace.

Functionality to adjust the intensity of normal maps, using a scalar parameter in the instance

My own Crevice shader, which uses the ambient occlusion to darken or lighten crevices.

None of this is made using a borrowed workflow available online, mind you, although it does use certain techniques. I'd never used Unreal Engine 4 in an art-based capacity before this. I hadn't even built a working environment, period. The assets, blueprints and materials have all been built with the level they're being used for in mind. The foliage, the decals, the clouds, the sky sphere, the masks, the snapping units. All of it was new to me before I made it.

I was almost tempted not to upload this, since it's a very dubious piece when placed in the wider spectrum of industry. It could be a diorama as much as an environment, and it doesn't follow any of the conventional rules. There's no mind paid to texel density, or draw calls, or the player's path, since I was already learning about blocking out, lightmaps, trim sheets, decals, foliage, scene lighting, the spawning functionality which makes the clouds, and all of that jazz as I went. It follows no established workflow, nor is it 'game ready', either visually or technically.

I also think, in hindsight its a bastardisation the original level. FEZ, a game which I have no limit of respect for, maximises the ability to play and manipulate the conventions of 2D pixel graphics and isometric camera, so creating a 3D environment with a perspective camera is disservicing the original. Phil Phish, if ever you see this, I apologise for what this is doing.

However, this environement also represents a great deal of progress in my own skills. And as a piece to look at, and pan around as I've edited, I still think it's pretty gorgeous. I think I'd want to just take a nap here, then maybe see what was behind those doors.

This placed 13th in its category for the Staffordshire Unversity Final Year Students Showcase