My Project Brief - Full

Kane Dainton - BA Game Art Design 3^rd Year - FMP – Project Brief

Brief:

For my Final Major Project, I am to design and create an explorable, playable environment, part photo realistic, the rest painted. The environment will be a challenge to improve and showcase skills with organic assets and objects (assets) you see in the real world but also a large variety of made up realistic objects and a few special detailed assets (weapons, large equipment). Also, because it will a playable environment, I would like to display simple dynamic elements to give life to the organic assets and an atmosphere so you can tell what time of day it is, if this place gives off certain moods, lights in different places and so on.

My final decision:

So I am going for, is a small closed in swampy forest that will have a single path leading to the main area. The main area will open up a bit into a current time, modern custom style built home with references to sourcing its own energy and being made from materials in the surrounding area, hence the swampy forest in the beginning. With this one simple idea, it sets up a wide range of possible assets and dynamic elements I could make to fill this environment and give it some interest. I can use and find loads of reference for these in high street shops, new build houses along the outskirts of town and at local parks.

This house will hold the large variety of ornamental assets I hope to make, have preferably large glass windows or walls and good lighting to set the scene and open out a good view of the surrounding area you travel through to get here. The variety of assets is to show how many different types of materials and effects I can pull off such as specular, bump, reflections and so on which I need to work on personally. The environment is mostly outside so a skydome is needed.

Optional:

Extra work I could do would be sounds to add the environment that changes where you go. Alongside the initial dynamic elements I want to go for, if I have spare time, I could possibly carry on extending and have interactive assets, since it’s playable but these are just extra and not a definite depending on my state of work at certain timeframes. The environment as whole is what matters.

Software to be used: (what I am most comfortable with)

3ds Max 2013
UDK Editor
Crazybump
Photoshop

LOD:

Equivalent to a PS3 or Xbox 360 game. No specific tri limit but assets should not be made too dense. The special or hero assets will contain more detail but as a whole, the environment should try to stay even on tris and 1024x1024 textures. If I create an opening in the closed off area that displays an environment in the distance, the LOD will be significantly reduced depending on distance.

Outcome:

1.       5-10 beauty screenshots of the environment displaying different perspectives and as much as possible into each shot.

A video flythrough of the level from beginning to end, around 30 seconds long.