About the Project

Uncharted 2 is a masterpiece of game art and I loved many things in the great Borneo scene: beautiful colors, powerful vegetation, and awesome terrain. I thought this was a great opportunity to recreate one of the levels that I loved for Jeremy Huxley’s Vegetation and Plants for Games course at CGMA.

My main goals for this scene/course were to work on a natural environment, learn a solid technique for foliage, trees, and rocks, sculpting and texturing plants, blend materials with Substance Designer, gain more experience in UE4. The main thing I wanted to do was to recreate the scene in Unreal Engine as precisely as possible. I took care to keep the quality of the details and bring them closer to the graphics of Uncharted.

I started looking for some cool concepts and ideas on the internet. I think one of the most important resources for any Environment Artist is the Art Direction for Uncharted 2: Among Thieves. It covers the visual development process of the environments and walks you through the way we apply design principles to translate a 2D concept art to a complete 3D interactive environment.

Reference & Inspiration

My work began with a concept for the game Uncharted 2. This concept was perfect for the course. There was a lot of vegetation and ground terrain in it, and it also recreated the mystic level atmosphere (Day & Afternoon) that is not so easy to express.