Container City End

The container city project has drawn to an end and I've got to say, I'm incredibly proud of my group and the work we've made. I'll start off with the actual map so you're not confused.

Our overall idea was to have a post apocalyptic area (where you start) which leads into this really futuristic lab. Lots of contrast in environment with some good storytelling and a few interactive elements. I began the project by thinking ahead essentially. From the first week, I was in engine finding out if we could actually implement everything we'd talked about. Things like flashlights, crouching, light switches and destructible meshes. Everything was technically working by the second week in. We just had to replace my bsp boxes with actual meshes. In terms of assets and the actual population of the map, I didn't make much. I was primarily the engine man and I did ultimately build the entire map, particle systems, collision, blueprints and so on. Asset wise, the only thing of much importance was the rocks which make up a good portion of the map. So much so that we have around 800 of them on the level. Here's how I made them without much effort.

Here's my rock meshes. They're about 200 tris each.

Here's that very same rock on the right in engine. It's all down to working smart or just generally cheating ever so slightly. In short, I used tessellation to make the flat rocks protrude. You essentially plug a displacement map in and tell it to add triangles to the mesh relevant to the displacement map. And the result is a somewhat realistic model out of nothing and a lot less work than taking the mesh into zbrush and baking down the normals.