World builder Post Mortum

OverView

The word builder project was a seven week project were we were tasked with creating an environment piece as a personal interpretation of a place in a piece of well known literature. The catch: this piece must not have been turned into a film or series, as to not be able to use that as a starting point. For the project I chose William Gibson’s “Neuromancer”. For my environment I decided to create a street in the night city.

Here is my 2D concept:

After Testing in engine, I decided to remove the road, street lights, and narrow the scene significantly.

Then testing the post processing effects, and atmospheric effects.
Once I had settled on all of the effects I set out to do the leg work of creating the assets and setting up the scene, you can find more information on this here.

result

Here is the final video footage of the scene:

I feel the project was successful due to the positive reaction that I received from my facilitators and my peers. Along side this, the project accomplished most of the susses goals that i had planed the project to achieve.

DOCUMENTATION

A large portion of the success for this project was due to the volume and effectiveness of the documentation that I created to ground this project. Mainly the art bible and the work break down structure, as they were used to focus the visual narrative, and reinforce progress with the production of the project respectively.

Here are some screen shots.

 

 

 

Engine

Using Unreal Engine 4 was great, as I already had quite a bit of experience with the engine from personal works in my past. The greatest learning curve over the course of this project came from using the material editor but with my now found knowledge using the material editor I can quickly and effective make complex materials that can be used in a variety of future projects.

Technical frame work

Creating a set technical frame work and and file structure was my main stratify to avoid issues that i have faced in the past with file corruption and data loss. Using a proper file structure saved time by keeping my files organised.

Here is an example of this system:

This system was described to my class by Brett, one of our facilitators.

how it works:

You have one master folder, for ease of copying the entire library for backup purposes. Inside the master folder, you have folders named as the assets, these contains the asset master file, that is used as the source for all referenced files, as well as the textures, and a final folder containing the iterative versions of the asset.

Issues

Out of all of the projects that I have taken part in this project had the least issues, the largest problem that I encountered was purely time, being the sole contributor to the project. By the time that I had settled on a concept and had completed all of the documentation, it was already week four of seven. Production was hampered by getting sick, an inevitability in any solo project.

future considerations

The main considerations I will make in the future are to do with the way I approach the documentation and how I setup my asset references. The documentation that I developed over the course of the project was a huge learning curve that will positively impact the way I plan projects in the future.