Life on Mars?
This was my last assignment from art school at the Savannah College of Art & Design. The assignment was to concept and create a game environment from scratch using Unreal Engine and whatever 3D software we wanted. Then post it on The Rookies for peer review. I was fascinated with creating digital environments and characters. I modeled, textured, lit, rendered everything and also recorded an arrangement for the song that inspired the scene, Life on Mars? by David Bowie. I pulled out the ol’ 2012 MacBook Pro just so I could access Garage Band one more time.
Here’s the video walk-through I submitted for the assignment:
The Idea
There is a really interesting dwelling built into a cave in Northwest Arkansas called the Beckham Creek lodge. I tried integrating cinematic sci-fi reference with this idea of embedding the hotel lobby into the side of a cave. I identified some of the modular components I would need to start building out and scaling up the scene.
The Process
I modeled and unwrapped everything with the Maxon One suite, textured with Adobe Substance Painter and Designer, and rendered with Unreal Engine 5.3. Here’s a closer look at the hero asset.
Here’s an early process shot of the layout of my scene with most items UV’d. I went very low poly for the floors and walls, choosing to rely on textures to sell the detail. I used blueprints in Unreal to “clone” the wall and floor panels throughout the scene.
Speaking of walls, I used Substance Designer to create a texture for the rock wall. Ended up using World-Aligned textures via William Faucher’s Easy Mapper to project the texture onto the rock shape.
Here are a few frames I pulled from the finished product. I hope you enjoyed it and give the actual song from David Bowie a listen…it’s a goodie.
The Result
I loved this project, from coming up with the concept to recording a piano cover of David Bowie’s song, Life on Mars? I learned a ton about the game development pipeline, how incredible Unreal Engine is as a toolset, and how true Murphy’s Law is. Literally the final week of the quarter, the week of final rendering and compositing work, I find out one of my RAM sticks died. I lost my computer, we call her the Beast, for three of those final days and actually rendered the final cinematic on an old HP Spectre notebook. Only took two days to do that so I missed some cleanup on some shots to beat the deadline. Overall, I’m happy with what I was able to ship in ten weeks from concept to completion.