My name’s Thom May, and I’m in my last term at the Gnomon School of Visual Effects, here in Los Angeles. I got my bachelor’s at UMass Amherst and a certificate in Multimedia from PCC (Portland). In the past, I’ve worked as an animation intern and as a 2D game artist.

Scene production

Before starting this project, I was playing a lot of Bloodborne, and I thought that the way that they approached set dressing was really smart – I wanted to play around with some of the same ideas, and the project mostly just spun out of that. For instance, they do a lot of mixing tileables with simple inserts (floating meshes made to match the underlying tiling textures), which is a central component to the cobblestone look here.

Illusion of a Bigger Environment

It’s funny: there’s actually a huge landscape in this scene that the camera never sees: when I started the project, I was learning a lot about Unreal Engine’s landscape tools, World Machine, and Speedtree. But the focus was always meant to be on the bridge, and after a while I just ran out of time to give the landscape the treatment it would’ve needed, to be at the same level. I went through a handful of pretty awful lighting iterations and eventually ended up on this more desaturated harsh lighting, and a lot of the background details just get obscured in shadow and super thick N64 fog.

Production of Meshes

My typical asset workflow would be something like this: first, block things out in Maya, and get it into the engine right away. Check the general proportions and how it actually looks in Unreal’s camera against the other elements – there’s no point in spending time doing a fancy sculpt, if the asset doesn’t fit. I would say that at this stage, I’m also trying to think (very broadly) about texturing: what size-ish is the texture probably going to be; how am I going to break it up if it’s an especially huge asset; which parts might have repeated textures. For this project, it’s a big area and the camera was way out, so I was actually working at a texel density of only 256 pixels/meter, which meant I could get away with a lot.