I’m doing some concepts for a new game idea. One of these concepts is the cave, where the player character is supposed to be able to explore a vast system of human-made industrial structures in an even vaster emptiness.

The Modelling Process

The models are extremely simple. The ladder as well as the pipe depend a lot on the mirror and array modifier in Blender. Both have no proper UV map and both do not use textures. The cave walls were done with Gaea.

Assembling in the Engine

Within Unreal, most of the work consisted of adjusting visual effects. The models were quickly placed. But then one of the lamp was supposed to flicker, which required a custom blueprint actor. Then it was a lot of value-tweaking in setting related to fog, global illumination, materials. And lastly, I created a niagara emitter for falling drops, which really is only scaled standard planes from Unreal with a custom material that fades from the center outwards so as to give it smoother edges.5

Conclusion

This whole project was a concept. So the goal was to create very quickly something that resembles what the final game might look like. That is why there are a lot of instances where an environment in a real game would be handled very differently. There would be textures for models, so that less has to be hidden with shadows. There would be textures for the rain drops, so it doesn’t require a custom shader, plus textures would offer more customization. And there would probably be a texture to simulate the volumetric light coming from the spotlights, rather than actually turning on volumetric fog.

So the learning is: textures can do a lot, but you can get sometimes around using them if you have to be quick and don’t care about performance. When it comes to concepting, that might save you some time and some hassle.