The idea of the environment was essentially “In an effort to save the environment, what is left of humanity moves to thousands of far reaching towers that not only act as residence, but also as terraformers.”. So with this idea in mind, I started whiteboxing the concept and planning materials. Originally I wanted to do the interior of this habitation pod, but the more time passed the more I ended up just neglecting that and doing the concept instead.

Workflow

For the workflow, I used some of the basic ideas of the how we do things at CIG, with the custom normals and mesh decals. For quite a while I tried to find the best way to do POM decals in Unreal Engine 4, and even considered using Lumberyard for this environment, but after a little while decided to just use the Normal/Roughness/Color decals that Unreal supports. From the start, I wanted to light the scene fully dynamically, to really learn what Unreal can do with its dynamic lighting. During the whiteboxing phase I spent quite some time working out metrics for the different assets on the scene, which in hindsight was a bit of wasted time since I wasn’t making a building set for game production. After realizing that, I decided to do a call-out sheet of the materials with some stretch goals in mind, since this was a timed effort after all, well as breakdown of the assets I felt would be necessary to make the scene work.