Spectre Divide: Environment Tech Art Explorations
Very early screenshots of Spectre Divide environment art direction explorations using Unreal Engine (UE4). During this time I worked directly with the Art Director, the Art Lead, and a Concept Artist, to try to nail down a unique anime look that achieved stunning visuals and quick reads for the type of game we were aiming to make.
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Results from early visualization development include vistas level of details explorations aiming to nail the 2D anime look while also trying to bring something fresh stylistically to the table. I worked directly with a Tech Artist in material prototyping tech for vistas, vegetation, and other complex shaders like water, plastic, metal, and glass, that we knew would be challenging to convey given the unique style we were aiming to make. Another privilege I had during my time there was to work directly with a Graphics Engineer on being able to incorporate specified shadow casters for certain objects to nail some of out stylization guides. I also had the chance to work on breakable blueprints, physics, and environment ink explorations.
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Very thankful for the talented team at Mountaintop, and the creative freedom they allowed me to have during my time there.
Early vista prototypes using a combination of cutout geo cards, and vegetation shaders to achieve simplistic shapes and facetted looks.
skybox + mountain cards + tower cards + stylized tree shader for 2D look
glass shader could use a mask to distort and input different colors. No reflection casted at all, giving more choice to the artist on the outcome of the look
glass shader
Baked lighting screenshot
vegetation
metals
Subtle plastic gloss
shadow caster tests
implemented simplified geometry to shadow cast a more stylized, less exact look to the baked shadows
cubemap windows tests quickly disregarded due to low performance shaders
puddle reference
Spectre puddle quick exploration
breakable planter edges
breakable blueprints prototypes for environment objects that we later got to place on the levels and playtest with.
testing the character inks in the environment to figure out if it made sense stylistically to have them be more present in the scene