For this assignment, we were tasked with creating an environment that would fit within a specified location and a chosen theme. It should be noted that there are slight differences between the versions of my teammates and the version featured in this post due to different circumstances. The references for the Inspiration mood board and any other referenced material are listed at the end of this post.
LOCATION, THEME EXPLORATION AND RESEARCHING
As we were assigned a Butcher’s environment, our next task was to decide what our subtheme was. From the list of themes provided, we discussed the potential themes that could work with our environment location and the themes that would be difficult to incorporate, such as corrupted and alien, ultimately settling on Victorian/Steampunk. We discussed that with themes such as corrupted and alien, they have quintessential elements that make up those themes, such as having an organic growth that is spreading across an area for corruption or having otherworldly materials for the alien theme that would not translate across to butcher’s shop easily.
From this, we started to gather inspiration and reference images for this assignment, gathering some examples of potential building exteriors, layouts and steampunk inspiration. As I have family who are butchers themselves, I was also able to gather reference images of tools and equipment that are used on a day to day basis that could be found or created to help with set dressing.
Padlet mood board: https://padlet.com/rusher2020/fg9sybg1103qtr7t
PLANNING AND CONCEPTUALISATION
From this, we started to plan and create concept layouts for the building itself. We had multiple versions of a layout before settling on the current design, as we had issues with factoring in the scale of a butcher’s shop. Our initial designs and layouts of the shop were extremely large which made the environment less like a butcher’s shop, given that we were to create a butcher’s shop found within a city.
I created a smaller version based on the ideas discussed in the group, along with potential asset placements for my team members. This helped to narrow the scale of the building down to a believable scale and allowed for the team to make changes to this design without creating something incredibly large and unbelievable.
In addition to the layout, I also considered the scene’s composition and lighting. As we wanted to draw the player’s attention, placing key elements in specific areas of the initial block out would create intrigue, causing the player to explore further. As an example, in the initial block out seen below, the player would walk through the exterior door into the butcher’s shop itself and see the archway leading to the backroom in the centre of the frame, which I believe would draw the player to explore further.
Moreover, the lighting that we had in the scene was set to be of an orange hue, based on the light that would be emitted from Victorian gas lamps and placed in key areas, such as above the countertops, which in turn provided lighting to the various assets below. The orange hue provided a warm and inviting feeling to the scene, as orange holds connotations of being inviting, welcoming and being able to capture attention (Becker, 2019), which I believe would draw people from the outside into the shop, whereas if we had set the lighting to be a cooler colour, such as white, it can provide a distant and cold feeling (Smith, 2016).
COLLABORATION, DISCUSSION AND FEEDBACK
For this assignment, I was assigned to be responsible for managing the group, ensuring that we were progressing as needed in order to meet the deadline and helping out by doing a series of background work, such as sourcing and gathering free assets and various materials from sites such as Sketchfab and Quixel that would fit within our environment, assisting with the Unreal block out, creating the segment of the city that is visible outside of the shop and any other additional tasks that arose.
In order to help with the time management of the group, I created a Trello board that outlined the base steps that needed to be covered, which was shared on Discord for the group. I already had a Trello board for myself that I was using for my own personal timekeeping, holding a mixture of tasks relating to creating my Hero Asset and tasks relating to this assignment.
Group Trello: https://trello.com/b/3ad7CoJV/environment-design-project
Personal Trello: https://trello.com/b/Vetxtqht/project-management-hero-asset
As mentioned above, I gathered free assets, decals and materials to help in the creation and clutter of the Unreal environment. Primarily, my focus for this was to gather meat assets that were free and of high quality, as some meat assets that I had seen on Sketchfab and similar websites were heavily stylised, which would have looked out of place within the environment that we were creating. To assist in helping with the textures for the environment, I found some materials on Quixel that were used to create certain elements of the shop; An example of this can be seen in the countertops, which are created from a scratched metal and a wood material, as the tabletops would not be entirely perfect and would have marks on them.
Another task that I did was assisting with the Unreal block out. The initial block out made use of an amalgamation of the basic cube shapes and geometry cubes, as previously seen above when discussing the composition of the scene, which made making any edits to the walls, such as removing a section to a window or applying textures, relatively difficult due to the different types. I was asked to assist with changing the Unreal level to use Geometry brushes and optimizing the lighting of the scene, as the initial block out had a large number of point lights, which was causing performance issues when trying to move and explore in the scene.
An additional part of the environment that I took on was the creation of the city outside of the butchers’ shop. This was done to help solidify our environment within the theme and to aid in later renders, as prior to this addition, the environment was floating in Unreal’s skybox with nothing to convey to the player that the team had created a Victorian/Steampunk Butchers shop. I used the Victorian House Builder pack by Aevoke Studios on Unreal Marketplace to create the city area, as the pack contained modular building pieces that helped to create the world that this butcher’s shop would be in. Furthermore, I added a few pipes from gathered modular packs and gear shapes to this area, as some of the most notable elements of the steampunk genre are gears, pipes and machinery, which help to convey our theme to the viewer.
The group discussions were often done between a mixture of in-person sessions where all members could be at a PC in the Media Centre or through calls online. The in-person discussions often had the group surrounding one PC providing constructive criticism on the environment design and experimenting with various aspects. The online calls often had a member sharing their screen so that all participants in the call could see what was occurring. During these calls, we discussed how we were progressing, ideas of how to add to the narrative, and how to populate specific areas using clutter items. In addition to having calls to discuss our progress, we also continuously shared the latest update of the environment if we were working on it remotely, as this allowed for us to have the latest updated version without having to repeat the workload of someone else in the team.
ENVIRONMENTAL STORYTELLING
In terms of environmental storytelling, we wanted to hint that something darker was happening within the shop. From the initial planning stage of this assignment, the team has been in a general consensus that we wanted to tell a darker story to the viewer, such as having the proprietor of our shop be in a rivalry with another business and the outcome did not end well for one of the individuals.
The placement of our hero assets was relatively in line with a standard layout of a shop, as Toby, Kameron and myself all had created a machine of some sort that would not be immediately within range of the customers for safety. As the player enters the building, they are met with Marshall’s statue facing them on the counter, which they can interpret as being the reasoning behind the shop’s name, Hog ‘n’ Cog, along with various additional assets to clutter the scene, such as the trays of meat lining the counter, Toby’s chalkboard and the cash register.
With the gathered blood decals, I started to apply them to the scene to give the player an indication that something has happened. I followed a Youtube tutorial on setting up decals in Unreal, as I had an issue with the decal not being visible against certain surfaces (Laley, 2018). As the rest of the environment is relatively pristine, the decals help to draw attention when exploring the area. In conjunction with other additional assets, such as the newspaper clipping by the door which mentions the closure of the Chicken and Chain and the rising crime rate, the player can follow the blood trail to the second chalkboard, which pokes and jabs at the Chicken and Chain and gloats about their new top spot. Some of the messages on the chalkboard have been partially erased, which the player may interpret as someone being annoyed with what was originally there. The blood continues into the backroom where the player is met with blood pooling under a large door (a placeholder asset), which creates questions for the player to ponder such as “What is behind the door?” and “What happened in this shop?” when piecing together the reasoning behind the altercation.
COMPOSITION, COLOUR AND LIGHTING
In Unreal, we used a mixture of various lighting types to light the scene, along with having light emit from the HDRI map used to texture the skybox. The inside of the shop primarily used Rect lights in an orange hue to attempt to replicate the same light emitted from gas lamps, whilst the outside was lit using a combination of point lights for the lamp posts and having light emit from the HDRI map.
When initially discussing and planning out the narrative of our environment, we agreed that the environment should be set at night to give the impression that the shop had just closed. To do this efficiently, we decided to use a HDRI map found on the site Polyhaven and applied it to our scene to create a textured sky in lieu of using the default Unreal skybox. We experimented with a number of different HDRI maps and found that most were not suitable for our project, given that they were either taken in a field or in the centre of a modern city, which did not fit with creating a steampunk cityscape and eventually settled on using the HDRI seen below.
When taking screenshots of the environment, I wanted to utilise a variety of different camera angles to highlight and showcase what has been created. When showcasing the exterior portion of the environment, I decided to use an up-shot in order to show the scale of the buildings in the city, which I feel provides the city with a grandiose nature.
Additionally, I used a close-up shot for the screenshot of the newspaper clipping by the door in order to capture the detail and text on it and a down-shot for the screenshot of the back room where my asset is placed. I felt as though these camera shots captured high amounts of detail and information about the environment in each respective shot without compromising the quality of the screenshot as a whole.
MADE AND FOUND ASSETS
One of the sections of this assignment that I took on was sourcing assets that could be used to help create and clutter the environment. Primarily, my main aim was to find free meat and other steampunk assets that would fit within the environment and weren’t heavily stylised and share them with the group for potential use.
In addition to helping source assets to use, I created two assets that are seen within the scene – the wall rack and the closed sign. The wall rack was created to help populate the walls of the butcher’s shop and allowed for my team to add assets to it, such as adding a ring of keys or an apron whilst the closed sign was created to help add clutter to the exterior environment based on Toby’s idea.
REFLECTION
The team for the majority of the project worked really well together, splitting the workload across the group and collaborating to create the environment seen below. I feel as though when we were working in person surrounding one PC, we achieved and progressed more than working remotely, as often when we held an online call, the call moved away from the environment and was spent discussing a topic that was not related. In addition to this, there were unfortunate circumstances that hindered being able to create the environment to the full extent, ranging from technical issues to ill health to receiving limited responses in the group chat, along with discussions of potential extensions, which meant that the group was further behind than intended. I took on additional work outside of my role in this assignment to ensure that this submission would be ready for the deadline.
If I had more time for the creation of the environment, I would like to refine further details within the scene. As an example, I would apply more detailing and machinery to the back as the clutter that I applied predominantly consists of meat assets, metal trays and various knives that could be found in a butcher’s shop. Moreover, I would like to have a cleaner, more steampunk inspired asset to represent the freezer door, as the door that can be seen in the environment was a placeholder due to my teammate receiving extensions.
I feel as though Victorian/Steampunk was the only theme that we were able to do for our location from the given list, as the other themes have defining elements which make up the genre that do not translate to the location of a butchers shop. As I have an inclination for dystopian horror, I would have liked to create something sci-fi or quarantine, which would have allowed for arguably more interesting hero assets and lighting combinations, such as the use of neon lighting for lasers within the sci-fi theme. For quarantine, I would showcase preventative measures that people would be taking to survive, allowing for the creation of intricate respirators, masks and ventilation systems.
ENVIRONMENT DESIGN VIDEO AND SCREENSHOTS
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nPm7NKFyCxE
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Referenced Material:
Becker, J. (2019) The psychology of design: Orange in branding and marketing. www.impactplus.com. Available online: https://www.impactplus.com/blog/the-psychology-of-design-orange-in-branding-and-marketing.
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Smith, K. (2016) Meaning of White: Color Psychology and Symbolism. Sensational Color. Available online: https://www.sensationalcolor.com/meaning-of-white/.
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