I have returned home from university for the summer and now have a little free time to work on what ever I want! My first project was to make a nice environment piece using the skills I learned from last semester. Excited to continue working on personal projects.

The Shielded Eagle Inn
by jcowin94
on Sketchfab

For our final assignment in our Environment Design class, we were tasked with creating a full game level in groups of four. My group and I decided to go with an oriental themed monastery for our project. We had to break down the tasks, work together and constantly communicate in order to pull of this task. I learned a lot more about high and low poly modeling as well as how to work in a group on a project like this.

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Although the school semester was very busy with classes at full tilt nearing the end of the year, Jeremy Moore and I decided to participate in our schools 168 hour game jam. We ended up creating a fast paced, 1st person, multiplayer, arena-style shooter. The setting is a very bland, colorless world but the more combat that takes place, the more colorful the world becomes. This project taught me a lot about creating modular environments in a fast paced way, let me create two great gun props and had me balancing my time with my weeks regular schedule and creating of the game.

In my environment class, we had a lesson on hand painting textures. We were given 4 models and a uv unwrap to, essentially, color in. The professor went over how to do some of this texture in class and the rest was up to us with help from provided video tutorials. I was really blown away with how a few little touches and techniques could really make the texture work. Here’s what I ended up with.

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This project has been in the works for 4 weeks! This is the hardest I have ever worked on a project. I bit off far more than I could chew but my professor believed that I could get it done and it looks like he was right. The assignment was to create an interior environment. To do this, we created a blueprint and block out, modular pieces, low polys of the modular pieces, high polys of the modular pieces, unwrap the low polys, bake the normals in substance painter, texture the low poly pieces, assemble everything in Unreal 4, then light the scene… you can see why it took 4 weeks including all of my spring break. Time well spent. Please enjoy the picture gallery!

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It’s been a long time coming. I am now familiarizing myself with Unreal and, I have to say, it’s quite nice. The texture panel was a little intimidating at first but after playing around with it, I was able to hook everything up correctly. As well as the table, I have also modeled this fishtank and they look very nice together in engine!

Using my knowledge of normal maps, specular maps, diffuse maps and ambient occlusion maps, I created this table. Nothing fancy but it’s the first thing I was tasked to create for my new and exciting project. Will be putting it in engine very soon, more to come about this cool new game.

My environment design class tasked me with the creation of a building that could be used in an RTS style game like Sim City or Command and Conquer. The building I chose to do was a 50s-style diner inspired by the obscure “googie” architecture of the time. This building features modular pieces and shares all one 2048 x 2048 texture.

I am now taking an Environment Design class at Southern New Hampshire University and these last few lessons have blown my mind! We have been learning all about different ways to model realistic environments from textures and other fundamental strategies for realistic environment modeling. Fascinating stuff! This building was built from one texture that I put together and then modeled out the modular pieces from.

I had a little free time with a big gap in my finals this week so I decided to take the teacher up on his offer of extra credit assignments. This project really helped solidify my skills in low poly/high poly modeling and baking normals. My favorite part about this assignment was the email I received from the teacher saying “That’s awesome, but you really didn’t need the extra credit.”