Creating My Environment
Once my asset was completed, the next thing on the list was to design an environment to put it in. Because we are in groups making these environments that all link, we all started to look through assets on the Unreal Marketplace so that we could all use themed assets for our different rooms.
Before even starting on our hero assets, we set about making a mood board for the theme of sci-fi / alien submarines which gave our team a pretty solid idea of what would be contained within a submarine area. Personally, I leant towards a scene for the storage room of a submarine, with things such as toolboxes and gas canisters because I think my hero asset would fit in perfectly in that environment, especially when I make it stand out from the rest of the items in there through lighting and other assets assisting it, guiding the player to it immediately.
We found it very hard as a team to find assets relating to our initial vision of a fleshly living interior and so we had to make it more sci-fi oriented, especially since we were restricted to the free asset packs as we can’t expect the whole group to contribute money as if one person uses paid assets, the whole group would have to as well.
Kuba found a lot of the assets we ended up using and they sent them to our discord so that we were able to use them too, giving our projects a similar look and feel. Unfortunately, as mentioned before, we had to lean towards a more sci-fi theme as the assets we found were very sci-fi, but they still fit the aesthetic we were aiming for which was alright in the end, and we were still able to get assets to make our areas seem like a submarine even if they feel more like spaceship parts.
With the asset packs all downloaded, I started making the groundwork for what I wanted my part of the environment to be like. I started making a basic entrance through a thin hallway as if you’ve just gone from one of the other rooms into mine, allowing our environments to be connected, and I made that hallway expand into a larger area that I was going to put my asset and make the area like a sci-fi submarine.
Once I had a basic layout of the size of the room, and the basic placement of my original asset in the centre of the room. The reasoning behind placing my asset in the centre is simple; it brings attention to the hero asset the second you walk into the room. The whole point of the room is to draw your attention to this one asset and so every detail I add to the scene from now on will be to add to the effect of the room and to draw the player’s attention to the chest.
To make the room look better and fit with the submarine theme, I wanted to theme the room as a storage area or a room that is hidden away from the main submarine area and I wanted to perfectly replicate that feel. To do this, I wanted to add crates, boxes, toolboxes and canisters of oxygen and hydrogen. The oxygen canisters are especially important to give it more of a feeling that in this environment there is not an unlimited amount of oxygen as it is under the sea. I also wanted wires around the area, some lying on the floor, some hanging from the ceiling and I also wanted some pipes around the area to make it seem more industrial and like the back room of a submarine.
To further draw attention to the chest, I added a gate around it showcasing to the player that it is far more important than any other item in the room. It gives the room a larger sense of mystery as this usually uninteresting storage room has a very unusual important chest that the player doesn’t know anything about why it’s there initially.
it could cause the player to think of many different reasons as to why it’s there. It is clearly important and the player would be intrigued about what is inside of it, and the story behind it in the first place. Is it some sort of alien living chest? Or rather is it a man-made object built from the flesh and bones of other animals or even other humans.
A very special gameplay opportunity could also be made from this hero asset as it could open to reveal something else horrifying for the player. However, I wanted to focus on the mystery in this initial showcase, so I will not be opening the chest and designing a plot point for it right now, I will leave it up to user interpretation and try and guide the player into thinking of various possibilities.
To make the environment look natural, I scattered items around in a certain way. I leaned some air canisters up against other items and had some lying down on their side to look like they have just been thrown there and there was not much care about the items in this room. I also put tools such as a screwdriver and wrench on top of the toolbox to make it look more like a storage room where they would keep tools to fix things on the submarine.
I then proceeded to add some lighting and a ceiling to the area I made. I wanted a variety of lights, with some being fluorescent tubes and some being red warning lights. The red lights will be bright and create a sense of atmosphere in the room and make it look ominous and mysterious.
For the white tube lights, I used a spotlight to direct the light into the room, as it was more effective in lighting up the area than the spotlights. I additionally used spotlights for the red siren lights and turned up their intensity and changed their colour to red as the lights were initially quite weak and didn’t have the desired effect I wanted.
The effect of the red lights in the room really makes the chest area stand out and look dangerous which is absolutely perfect for the effect I’m going for.
In the photo, I also added the ceiling to make the room look nicer instead of having a skybox. The red-light reflections from the metallic wall, floor and ceiling look amazing and create the exact ominous effect I desired in this scene.
With all these new assets in the scene, the list in the world outliner was very packed and unorganised which is not ideal when I wanted to move and readjust certain aspects of the scene, so I decided to go and sort them into folders to keep them somewhat under control. These folders were for the ceiling, walls, floor, lighting, and the decorations around the scene. As you can see in the screenshots below, it makes the outliner a lot tidier and allows me to look through all my assets easier.
I wanted to include a door behind the player’s initial spawning position for my area too so that it would show a clear way where it would connect to the areas the other members of my team have created, but I did not make and connect it to theirs for now because I’m focusing on my area, and that will be sorted once everyone’s work has been sorted.
Because everyone was using the same asset packs from the unreal marketplace, we had access to the same door and doorframe, and so that’s the one I used in my scene too, giving the environment a set art style that remains consistent between different team member’s locations.
The room I was making is coming along perfectly, but I wanted to add in various other aspects to make it better and better and make it more interesting. I noticed that I could use more wires and pipes in the room and maybe use more crates and aspects along those lines to fill the room out a bit more, so that’s what I set out to do.
I searched through the list of assets and found some rope that I could hang from the ceiling of the room, and I also found some wires and other electricity-based props such as a generator, and a wall-mounted cable system. These all add to the feel I wanted the room to be, which is a storage room theme which is perfect because the better I can portray that feel, the more effective the hero asset becomes as it makes the player question more and more why it is bundled with all this gear.
I also was able to find more crate assets, and some cloth assets with them to cover them up slightly which makes the area feel more and more like a storage room. I added a large cloth onto the floor of the area to cover up some empty space and also make this room seem less cared for and just have random storage stuff thrown about – Except the chest in the middle which looks like it is cared for a lot and been put there very carefully.
I also found an asset for a fire extinguisher and a wall mount for it which I thought fit well for the room as a whole so I added that on one of the walls as it adds to the feel of a storage area on a submarine.
I decided to additionally add some more gas canisters along the floor and on top of crates too to show the carelessness of how things are organised in this room. Some are along the floor and seem to have just been thrown around and I put a sideways barrel on the floor next to the others too. Some boxes are leaning against others instead of being stacked perfectly too so it further shows to the player the carelessness being put into this storage area.
Once I was happy with the assets in the scene, I tweaked the lighting slightly as it was hard to see some assets in the scene, so I made the white lights brighter and extend further and turned the red lights up too so I would still have the red light danger effect to draw attention to the main hero asset in the scene.
Now that I’m happy with the result of my environment, I will be creating a first-person perspective video and taking some screenshots of the area to showcase it, and this will be done in the next blog post.
Bibliography:
Denys Rutkovskyi (2016) Spaceship Interior Environment Set Available Online: https://www.unrealengine.com/marketplace/en-US/product/spaceship-interior-environment-set [Accessed 26/05/2022]
Denys Rutkovskyi(2020) Factory Environment Collection Avaliable Online: https://www.unrealengine.com/marketplace/en-US/product/factory-environment-collection [Accessed 26/05/2022]
Julio Juarez (2021) Polar Sci-Fi Facility Available Online: https://www.unrealengine.com/marketplace/en-US/product/polar-sci-fi-facility [Accessed 26/05/2022]
Jonathon Frederick (2017) Modular SciFi Season 1 Starter Bundle Available Online: https://www.unrealengine.com/marketplace/en-US/product/modular-scifi-season-1-starter-bundle [Accessed 26/05/2022]
Jonathon Frederick (2018) Modular SciFi Season 2 Starter Bundle Avaliable Online: https://www.unrealengine.com/marketplace/en-US/product/modular-scifi-season-2-starter-bundle [Accessed 26/05/2022]
