Contemporary Games Design
Contemporary elements today are quite limited when it comes to computer hardware, but has changed over the past 10 years due to new technology being introduced. There are many contemporary technology today that has changed. E.g. Facial Recognition, Voice Recognition, Gesture Control, Graphics, High-Definition displays, Virtual reality and many more!
With the idea of creating an abandoned scene that would contain different rooms such as a shop where the user could pick up items and interact with the objects within the scene, there would be a hallway dividing the dome area and the shop where there would be more viewing scene for creatures at the back of the scene.
After a couple of tests with more drawings, the final idea was to create the dome area but with just the hallway due to time limitations and over complicated environment, when the main focus should be on the contemporary element.
Designing the elements for the environment took a couple of attempts due to the design layout of the environment, the image above was the first iteration of what the main dome area would look like and once it was brought into unreal engine it was chosen!
After applying materials, foliage and lighting from Unreal Engine this is what the final scene was going to be, but due to a fault of my own the scaling for the environment was completely off and had to redesign the whole environment from scratch and redo.
Virtual Reality will be chosen as the contemporary technology that is looked at personally. With the initial task of creating a Virtual Reality environment demonstrating what Virtual Reality has to offer, the task of creating an environment was going to be fun! The first plan was to create an abandoned environment that would have various over grown plants that would cover the wall and flow down.
When creating the environment within Maya, I had some issues where some of the faces would be black, which would be it would be transparent when importing into Unreal Engine, but this shouldn’t cause any issues when walking around the players space etc, because you wouldn’t be able to see any of the outside walls.
Importing the project into Unreal was a simple as drag and dropping the FBX file exported from Maya into the editor. For some reason, the scaling was slightly off compared to Maya, but was soon fixed when scaling it + .2 in the x,y,z.
The original idea of creating the project inside Unreal Engine version 4.24, at the start of creating the environment water was applied from the Epic Marketplace, the water wasn’t realistic enough and didn’t show much of the underside of the water. Unreal Engine 4.26 was released on the 3rd of December and built into the new update was a more modular water shader that you can apply to your terrain, they provide elements such as: Oceans, Lakes and many more! Not only does 4.26 provide water built into the engine, they added much more optimizations tweaks to engines especially when it comes to using Virtual Reality.
For foliage in the scene and small assets such as cups, mugs and twigs use of Quixel’s Megascans will be used to create a more realistic environment. Quixel Megascans is a massive scan library with the world’s largest and fastest growing scanning library. It comes with Thousands of 3D and 2D assets that are being scanned based on our immediate needs. https://quixel.com/megascans
The room behind the main scene will be scattered with different objects on the floor to make it look more ‘abandoned’. This back room will be used for storage for the room props, but will also be the place where the user starts on in the environment.
