Starting off, here are the first pieces of concept art I made to flesh out how the level was going to be.
These pictures are huge so open them up in a new tab to scroll around and soak them all in. We're going to mainly focus on just one of the rooms, and then I'll show the finished rooms at the end. So as you could see, these were my blockouts for the layout of the rooms, this was mainly so I could get a sense of how big my enviro pieces would be and to make sure I could walk between them with plenty of room.
As I was limited to 20 individual pieces, I didn't make too many blocks inside the room, and planned around using as little as possible. Shortly after making the blockout, I started making some props, and getting them placed in the room. On the top there, you can see the transition from blockout to actual props modeled in Maya, in that second area to the right I could work with my lighting, which we did a lot of in class on test rooms and the like.
Roughly a week later, and some sick days for luck, we have a room with actual props. At this point it's still a little empty though, and we needed to make these rooms seem full of stuff, these weren't new and shiny areas after all, especially not for my concept art. A lot of these props at this point were a little rough, and needed some more refining, but I was placing props, and that's what counts.
More props placed, nothing too exciting yet.
Huge jump! Lighting was figured out, with spaces carved into the arches to hold them, and I started getting some textures down. All textures were done in Substance Designer because of how easy it is to make tiling textures in it and simple materials such as wood, stone, etc. I would like to thank all the people on youtube making tutorials for designer and painter alike, they helped me get through most of this project, and I walked away with a better understanding of what I can do in designer. The overall direction when it came to textures was looking at what the concept art drew and then adapting that as I saw fit, that and reusing as much as possible! A simple stone pattern was used almost 4 or 5 times alone. Whether or not that's a good thing to do is unknown to me, so I'll just say "whatever works" is the best policy.
More textures, more prop work. I'll take this time to say that the amount of work it takes to make a level is more than you think, but not as much as you fear. Once you start figuring out where you can reuse pieces and textures, and start filling up a level, the whole thing kind of clicks and eventually you just start moving forward knowing exactly what you need from your props/pieces and what your textures need to be doing. I went back and revised my more complex walls 5 or so times as I went through just to constantly update them along with the rest of the level. I don't think it is too much of a drawback to do it this way, but it's probably a safer bet to plan out what your pieces need to look like beforehand.
Added some color, this is also the last picture before the assignment was "finished". Textures at this point were starting to get moved around as more were completed. If you compare this one to the previous photo, you can play a little "Spot the difference" game. Props at this point were pretty much final, and the lighting was also done for the most part. Fun fact, the makeshift bbq pit in front of the tent is the only prop textured in Substance Painter rather than Designer and it it's pretty sad to look at now, for one it's much too dark and in an attempt to really dirty it up I covered the actual material. In comparison, the rest of the area is strangely clean though. This is one of those learning moments, and since I didn't actually fix it for the final showing, I guess I learned that I should learn substance better?
And here we have the completed level with lighting and post process applied in Unreal! This whole process seems pretty easy when you lay it out like this, but each gap between pictures is usually several or more days of working on small sections, as well as modeling and creating textures. The vert painting (those dark blobs you see placed on walls here and there. The way it works is that you lay a texture over the existing texture at each vert point, lack of verts seems to give this blobby effect that I'm not a fan of.) really didn't turn out well now that I look back, so that's also something I should focus on learning a little better, but overall I thought the rooms looked nice. I didn't have much to say because I was so sick of looking at them by the time it was due, but here I can pour out all my feelings on them. The hallway splits up two different post process effects, the bar being much darker than the campground, and there's also some dust particles floating around the bar, probably due to the poor air condition in there. The campground and bar have an extra door leading god knows where, but I forgot to put a doorknob, either because I couldn't be bothered, or I was simply lazy. No one was going to look anyway, but still, always go the extra mile for your game. This was a long month, and it gave me a shock when I found out I had forgotten some basics of modelling somewhere along the way, probably due to not needing to model anything big for a couple of months before.
