Futuristic City

Going back to the setting and style I explored in my short film “Dystopia” as a part of my bachelor thesis, I wanted to see how realistic I could make that film’s world with UE4. You can actually see the robot from the game in the scene guarding the entrance of the building. From the beginning, I wanted to work with something that could run on a VR device or on a PS4 budget. At work, we generally have very strict budgets, and I typically use a project like this as a testing ground to practice new techniques and workflows—essentially to understand what works and what doesn’t. I wanted to keep it below two million visible triangles on the screen. Most of it averages out at 1.3 million visible triangles with some extreme peaks at 1.6 million visible triangles. I haven’t yet performed any draw call optimization or LOD setup—I’ve still got plenty of work to do with this futuristic environment!

Start

I started with the vista. At the time, I was testing different techniques for creating a cheap vista because the remaining Paragon budget primarily targeted performance problems within the project. As a result, projection matte painting onto simple geometry became the pragmatic way to move forward. And I figured since movies did it all the time, I could do the same in a video game! Next, I focused on one of the smaller buildings. I based the look off several real locations in Tokyo; I didn’t do a block out at first. If I’m the only one working on an environment, I can imagine it very well. Once I incorporated a few buildings into the environment, I used those to block in the scene.