Inspirations board: thinking about a setting for a survival-horror game driven by exploration and curiosity of the player, I found Islamic architemture and mosques, abandoned places, old cellars and traditional public bathrooms a good mixture to start with. My next step was to think about how I can merge these places together.
Then I started to recognize the repetitive patterns and modular pieces within the selected inspirations. For my modular environment design, I needed to create general environment parts in order to break them into more detailed version later.
More repetitive patterns and modular pieces in other selected images.
Most of the time in this project I used Maya for modeling purposes. Here I used it to block-out my initial concept of the environment. You can see I have tried to merge different environments into one as well as using modular pieces. In this phase, having a sense of scale of the environment was very crucial, so I used a sample model with a standard height for a FPS avatar to estimate the other parts. My intention was to create moods of entrapment, imprisonment and a sense of claustrophobia within experiencing this place.
Here I have imported the blocked-out updated model into Unreal Engine 4. I made the place asymethrical and choatic as opposed to my intitial sketches while kept the identifable parts and seperating them into pirmary and secondary focal points of the environment.
Here are my modular pieces, UV-mapped in Maya.
My hero asset (the one that is the main focal point of the whole environment) is a washing machine. At left, you can see the detailed model without textures, in Maya. The right images are showing the hero asset with Color-map, Normal-map and Ambient Occlusion-map, imported into UE4. In the final version of hero asset, I refused to put the door for the washing machine, trying to give it a more obscured and creepier look as well as creating questions in the mind of player which helps to develop the story behind this place.
Imported modular pieces and assets into UE4 with various texture maps. Here are some shots before tweaking the lightings and adding post-processing effects and other detailed geometries and assets to the scene.
Below you can see the final shots, captured with in-game rendering engine of UE4.
