Grim Dystopia Part 1

Contrary to my previous thoughts, I thought getting back into Unreal from a 5 - 6 month hiatus would prove to be difficult, but soon as the program loaded up everything started flooding back to me. Unreal is awesome, its given me a kickstarter I need back into Art. 

I thought first off what I thought I'd do is create a scene using minimal assets and use existing assets which come with the UDK examples oh! and also spend less than 16 hours making it. I like a challenge and I thought this will be great start to test myself.

So I started viewing all the existing assets that the UDK Beta comes with, there are some awesome assets in there so pretty quickly I decided to create a futuristic cityscape blending old and new technology, a city set in the mountains. I called it Grim Dystopia.

I chose only to do a section of the cityscape because creating a full city would take far too long. So I planned out the basic blockout through a top down sketch. 

 Apologies for the appalling sketch but it did the job I needed it to do, and that was to get the basics down and get started in Unreal.

I think the basic blockout is the best foundation to work with, when creating a scene from scratch. I need to define what are the staple or most prominent features of the environment and how I can display them in a way that is visually striking as well as conforms to the restraints of a Video Games Level Design.





I started building up assets from the bottom left corner of the sketch once I had the block out created. I chose this spot because its where the player starts from.

When creating something from scratch I like to have a small area in which I put as much detail in as possible to set the scene. This gives me a great sense of what overall I'm trying to achieve with the environment.

Once I finished the small scene I continued building up the starting point with some of the larger assets in the background. Here are a few more screens of progression with the scene:

This final image of Part 1 illustrates the spawn point in which players start from. The foliage really starts making the scene feel more lively and organic.