Introduction

Hello everyone!

My name is Ramon Schauer. I am a student currently studying Animation & Game at Darmstadt University of Applied Sciences in Germany which I will graduate from in a couple of weeks.

My main focus is on 3D environment art and lighting, however with my last couple of projects, I became more interested in character art as well.

During my studies, I had the chance to work at Deck13 Interactive on “The Surge” as both a 3d environment art intern and a junior environment artist, which was an awesome experience.

As this project was my bachelor project I knew that I only had a limited time frame of a little less than 3.5 months which is why I had to choose my scope right from the beginning (look back at it now it was still way too much).

Knowing that creating a full game on the level of quality I wanted was not feasible, I still wanted to work on a project which has more context than just an individual environment or a selection of props I decided to go for an intro cinematic/teaser trailer for a non-existing game.

This also was a great excuse to get more insight into the cinematic capabilities of Unreal Engine 4 as I am very interested in real-time rendering and how it will affect traditional film workflows.

Two awesome sound students joined me to help out with sound and music, which really got the project to a higher level of quality. Originally I wanted to focus mainly on the environment, but as time went by the character became more and more important for what I wanted to convey.

As I am not very good at writing I knew from the beginning that I did not want to tell a full story, but rather tease and hint at individual story elements which suggest a larger context of a full game and get the viewer interested in finding out more about this.

Overall, my approach to the project was based heavily on the advantages of real-time rendering. Everything was blocked out in Unreal at the beginning, where the sequencer would allow me to fly through my scene and “find” the right shots directly using the final camera view. Using this approach I created several animatics which I iterated on until I achieved the final result by slowly replacing all the block out elements with final assets.

Inspiration & References

As for the setting I wanted to go for a fairly realistic medieval setting, similar to The Witcher or Game of Thrones, which overall were my two main references. Other Projects I looked into for inspiration were Hellblade, Kingdom Come: Deliverance, Uncharted 4 and Hunt: Showdown.

The setting should look similar to something like the Scottish highlands with the main focus on nature and only a few man-made looking assets, indicating that the story takes place in an area which is sometimes frequented by humans, but still outside of a village or larger settlement.

In terms of atmosphere, I wanted to go for the contrast between yellow/orange vegetation and an overcast, slightly blue sky and some light snow.

I actually tried to create an environment with a similar mood 3 years ago at the beginning of my studies, but felt that I could not properly capture the atmosphere I imagined – so overall this also was a nice little test for myself to see if I have improved in this area over the last years.

For the overall mood and colors, the work of Piotr Jabłoński was a huge inspiration, especially this one here: