Pre-production and Production

Layout

I decided to go on Microsoft whiteboard to sketch out what I wanted the layout of my level to look like. I'm not very good at drawing so I thought it would be easier to draw it on my computer instead of drawing it on paper because it's a lot easier to erase mistakes. Due to the time limit I have to create the environment art for my game, I will only be making a small sector of it. I decided to make the art for the start of the game, which will be based on the start of the main village path, where most of the shops and cafes are. I placed the clocktower right in the center of the level because I want it to be the focal point of the level. By doing this, it will grab the players' attention and make them walk to that direction. I need this section of the game to really introduce the player to the mood of the village and really just set the tone of how the walking simulator will play out.

Asset list

- basic house (modular asset)

- plants

- flowers

- tree

- bush

- fence

- road (pattern on it)

- window

- door

- clock tower

- bicycle

- lamp post

- shop canvas awning

canopy

- wooden shutters

- wooden outdoor house

beams

- river (maybe)

- chairs

- tables

- maybe things to put on the cafe tables like flowers, candles, wine glasses, plates, old food on plates, cuttlery, and more

Making my clock tower

I started off by gathering a few pictures of clock towers in low poly/ stylised art styles, so I could get a better idea of what I wanted to make. However, I found that there weren't a lot of low poly and stylised clock towers on Artstation or google images. I didn't know what else to search up apart from 'clock tower' to find something similar, so I ended up taking one of the pictures from my initial mood board, which had a nice clock tower. Although there was a lack of reference pictures, collecting these pictures definitely helped me when modeling and texturing my model

To UV map my model, I didn't need to spend too much time for it because I'm going for a low poly flat art style. All I did was just rearrange the UV shells so it was more organised so when I went into photoshop to add colour to it, it would be easier. Before going onto photoshop, I decided to go on Adobe Color, to find a colour pallet. I'm strictly using these colours I found, so that all my models match with each other, ultimately so the scene looks consistent. I decided to use these certain colours because I thought they would make the level look lively. I also thought these colours fit my theme of the level being set in a European village. I used Photoshop to create my texture, instead of substance painter because the textures I'm making are simple and don't require a normal map. I opened my UV snapshot I took on Maya into Photoshop. I then added a second layer to set the background as black so I could see the UV shells. On the same black layer, I used the rectangle marquee tool to select the area I wanted, and then I used the paint bucket tool to fill in what I selected with the colour I wanted. It took a few tries of matching different colours on my clock tower before I was satisfied with how it looked on Unreal Engine. I do like how my clock tower came out, however, I think I will add clock arrows to it because it looks just a bit empty, as though there's something missing from it.

I wasn't sure how to start modelling the clock tower, so I started off with a basic cube and decided that I was going to make that into the archway of my model. I really liked the archway on the bottom left of my reference board. To make something similar, I decided to add a cylinder, rotate it, and cut it in half by selecting the faces of the bottom half and deleting them. I then selected the bottom edges and used the bridge tool to connect the edges together, so that it would be easier to customise the length of the bottom half to create an archway frame. I then aligned it to the original cube, to a point where I was satisfied. After this, I selected both models and used the mesh - booleans - difference tool. This then used the cylinder I altered, to hollo out the cube. I then did the same process but with a smaller cube than the original to complete the archway. To make the tower, I used the extrude tool several times to add height. I made the roof by selecting the face of the top of the cube and making it smaller. I then added another cylinder and changed the sectors to 12 and copy and pasted that and made one of the cylinders bigger than the other. I aligned them into the centre of each other and used the booleans tool again to hollo out the cylinder to create a clock frame. I also added a very small cylinder and made that the centre of my clock. I then selected all the meshes and used the combine tool to combine all my meshes so i could easily UV map the model.

These are the other few colours on the clock tower I tried. The first two really fit my theme for my level, which is then why I decided to find some colours on Adobe color palette. The last one was me using the colours I chose but I thought it still didn't look good, so I thought i would change the roof colour to match the archway colour and make the colour of the body a bit lighter.

Making the basic assets

Includes: floor, fence, and houses

What I mean by 'basic assets', is the models that are easy to make, and maybe, depending on the model, I add more models to it to make it look better. For example, one of the basic models I make are the houses. I made one simple-looking house and later on I add windows, doors, and others. I'm doing this because It'll save me time, as I can then model only one house, one window, one door, and place them differently and change their shape on Unreal Engine to make each house different from the other. Right now it's important for me to save time since I'm behind a couple of weeks on work.

So I started off with making the floor because it's the base of my level and helps put things together nicely. I tried gathering some pictures to help me model the floor, but it was really hard to find pictures exactly of what I wanted. However, this wasn't really a problem since I already had a clear idea of what I wanted the floor to look like. I knew what I wanted it to look like since I've been to many small European villages on holiday before, and many have similar designs to mine. I made this model by using the multi-cut tool, which allowed me to create separate faces so i could the use the extrude tool to create different heights to the model.

I wanted the fence that I was creating to be really simple because I didn't want the players' attention to drift in that direction of the level because the plan is for them to walk in the direction of the clock tower. I couldn't really find a fence that I thought would fit in my scene but these pictures I collected from google images were the closes I was going to get. The one I liked the most is the picture on the top right. It's very simple, the only thing that I would not model as part of my model is the glass part of it.

I created my fence by starting off with a cube. I then selected one of the side faces and stretched it out until it looked like a rectangular pole on its side. I then used the insert edge loop. The insert edge loop tool inserts a selected amount of edges evenly spaced out on the edge you select. After inserting 7 evenly spaced out edges, I used the multi-cut tool whilst pressing the shift and control key on my keyboard to snap into place and wrap around my model. I used it next to each edge the edge loop tool made. I did this so it would create a face so I could select and extrude and extend to make the poles.

I decided not to change the original UV map of either the fence or the floor that I had made as I had decided that I wanted to keep them one solid colour.

To make my house, I started with a cube, I then selected the top face of it and extruded it to make it a slight bit bigger. I then extruded that new face and slightly raised it. I extruded that new face and made it a bit bigger, and then extruded it again and raised it to about a third of the bottom cuboid. I then made the top face smaller to make it look like a roof. I then went on UV editor and rearranged the UV shells so I could easily texture them later. I took a snapshot and imported it to Photoshop to texture it. These pictures below are the UV maps I made in photoshop.

I put all my models so far into Unreal Engine and put the suited textures to each one of them. I really liked how it looked so far but it looked just a bit off and I wasn't quite sure what it was so I moved a few houses around and changed the shapes of them on Unreal and it started to look a bit better but there was still something a bit off. I realised that the lighting was what was off about it because as I was using Unreal Engine and Maya, I was moving the softwares between each monitor (i have three different ones at home and two of the same ones at college). Therefore each monitor was showing different colours, one monitor making my level look nicer than the other.

So in order to change the lighting of my level, I selected skylight on Unreal Engine and scrolled to light colour, changed it to a light orange shade, and then selected intensity and changed it from a 1 to a 2. This made my scene look so much better.

The picture above is what my level looked like before changing the shapes of the houses and the lighting of the level. Even though there isn't a big difference, I definitely much prefer how it looks after. the unsymmetrical houses give the village more character and the lighting gives off a much nice vibe than prior.

Making assets for houses and the cafe

Includes window frame, wooden shutters, door, table, chair, canvas awning canopy, plants, menu sign.

After that, I used the multi-cut tool next to each edge loop to add a second edge loop close to the other one. I managed to do this evenly by pressing X so that when I moved the edges it would snap into place. I then selected The faces that were in between each edge loop and moved them back to make them look like wood planks. I then added another cube and reshaped it to look like a wood plank but going horizontally across the model. I then added a cylinder and turned it 90 degrees and put it on the end of the plank-like model I just made. I copied and pasted that cylinder and moved it to the other side of the plank. I did this to look like these planks had been nailed down onto each other, and the cylinders were the nails. I then combined the singular plank and two nails and copied and pasted them two more times and moved one to the center and one to the bottom. I then combined all the models together.

Before modeling my window, I decided to get some reference pictures to help me get a clearer idea of what I wanted to model. I collected some pictures on google images but I still hadn't found exactly what I was looking for, so I decided to go on google maps and drop myself in some villages around Europe that I had visited before. The top left picture is located in Lannion. I prefer these windows compared to any other one I found. I opened up Maya and started with a cube. I made the cube bigger by pressing R and adjusting the size. I then copied and pasted the cube and selected one of them and made it smaller. I then used the booleans tool to create the hole inside the window frame. Now to create the window shutter I also started with a simple cube. Adjusted the size to make it a wall-like shape. I then used the insert edge loop tool and added 5 edge loops to the model.

For the lerp connected to refraction, I connected the constant with the value of 1.05 to A, and the constant with the value of 0.95 to B. I then right-clicked and searched up fresnel_function and added another constant, changed the value of the new constant to 1.5, connected it to power, and connected the result of the fresnel_function to alpha of both lerps. I then changed the lighting mode to surface translucency volume and the blend mode to translucent. This then enables opacity and refraction. I then applied the new glass material to my windows but when you moved away from them they would glitch out and make it look strange. I wasn't sure how to fix this problem, so I remodeled the window frame and the glass, but it was still an issue. I spent a long time trying to find the problem, but I still couldn't find it. Because of this, I decided to forget about the glass right now and focus on doing other stuff so I don't waste all of my time trying to figure out the problem.

I exported both the window frame model and window shutter model into an fbx file and imported them into Unreal Engine. I wanted to create a glass material for my window to make it look better since the window frame and the shutter itself looked a bit boring. I have previously researched how to make a glass material on my previous projects so I already knew how to make one. I started off by adding a new material on Unreal Engine and renaming it "GlassMat". I then double-clicked it to edit it. I held 4 and left-clicked to add a constant 4 vector, this adds a colour picker and I changed the colours to R-0.005, G-0.001, B0.00848, and A-0.996. I chose these numbers since these are the numbers I had on my other glass material on my previous project. I then connected that to base color. I then held 1 and left-clicked three times to add three constants and connected them to metallic, specular, and roughness. I changed the value to them so metallic was 0.1, specular was 26 and roughness was 0.1. Again I'm just copying what my other glass material had. I then held down L and left-clicked twice, to add two lerps. I connected one to opacity and the other to refraction. I then added 4 more constants. For the lerp connected to opacity, I connected the constant with the value 0.008 to A, and the constant with the value of 0.9 to B.

I moved on to model the doors for the houses. I had a rough idea of what I wanted to model, but I thought it would be useful to collect some images just so I could get a clearer picture of the dimensions and other small details that are necessary. I wanted the doors to have the same look as the window shutters, so basically a wooden antique look. I definitely wanted to model a door knocker for the door so I made sure all the photos I collected had one. Before making the door model, I decided to make a door frame and test it on Unreal Engine because all the houses are on a hill. I needed to do this because if I had just made a normal door and added it to the houses then it would look like the door was misplaced since the houses are all on a slant. The first door frame I made looked weird and I disliked how steep the bottom part was compared to the floor. I made another one this time making it less steep, but it again looked bad. I then decided to make a step instead of a gradual slope to the door and it looked much better than the other two. You can see in the picture below the three door frames I made and how they looked.

To make the door frame I started with a cube and then reshaped it into a door shape. I copied and pasted the model and made one of them a bit bigger than the original one and then used the booleans tool to create the holo part of the model. I then selected the bottom face of the model and pressed the W key to make it longer. I then used the multi-cut tool to add an edge to the bottom half of the door frame to create a new face. I then selected that new face and used the extrude tool to make the step for my door frame. I then pasted the cube I had copied earlier to get the exact cuboid that fits in my door frame. I then used the exact method to create my window shutter on the door.

I used the insert edge loop tool and added 6 edge loops. I used the multi-cut tool and held down the X key to snap it in to place when I added the edges right next to the edge loops I just created. I did this to make the door frames look like wooden planks. Again I did the same thing to the window shutters and added horizontal wooden planks and nails to my model. I then decided to make door hinges. To do this all I did was add a cylinder and elongate it and added it to the right side of the door. To make the door knocker, I added a cylinder and rotated it. I copied and pasted it and made one bigger than the original. With the smaller cylinder, I moved it slightly higher so that the bottom half of the door knocker would be thicker than the sides. I then selected both objects and used the booleans tool to holo out the model. I then got a cube and placed it at the top of my knocker and used the booleans tool again. I then added another cylinder and reshaped it and placed it on the top half and the center of my door to create the base for it. I combined all the

Pieces together and went on UV editor and organised it in a way I could remember when I go on photoshop to texture it. Overall I liked how my door turned out, however, it's only now I realise that I never created a handle for my door. I will put this on a to-do list and go back and model one later. The picture

Cafe

on the right are the UV maps I created in photoshop. I used these colours because they matched the rest of my level.

I wasn't sure how to start making the cafe so I gathered a few images from google images, google maps, and Artstation to get a better understanding of what a European cafe should look like. What I noticed when collecting these images is that many of these cafes have canopies and that there were chairs and tables outside the cafe to let the guests dine outside. Most of them were also brightly coloured and decorated with plants. The picture I took most inspiration from when creating my cafe is the bottom left picture that I found on google maps. I liked how all the chairs were colourful and spread out unevenly. However, I took inspiration from the structure of the cafe from the top right Picture that i found on Artstation.

To make my cafe I started off again with a cube and reshaped it. I then got three different-sized cubes and placed them accordingly to the house-shaped object to figure out where I wanted the windows and door to be. When I was satisfied with the placing I used the booleans tool to create an indent into the house-shaped object. I used the multi-cut tool at the bottom of the second hole to create a step-like feature for the cafe. Now that the structure of my cafe was done I moved on to making the canopy. I started with a cube and reshaped it to fit the width of the cafe. I then moved one of the edges of the model downwards to create the obvious shape of the canopy. I then selected the face that was facing outwards and used the extrude tool and the W key to move it downwards. I then moved on to making the part that would hold the canopy into place. I simply did this by adding a cube and reshaping it. I also then added a cylinder and reshaped it accordingly to the other object. I copied and pasted the cylinder 3 times and moved them about until I was satisfied. I then combined all 5 models together and finally copied and pasted this and moved it to the other side of the canopy.

Before I modeled my chair and table I searched for some pictures that would help me get a clearer idea of what the dimensions for the chair and table should be. I already had a clear idea of what I wanted to make but without gathering some pictures to help I wouldn't know where to start when modeling. At first, I wanted to go with a solid seat for the chair, but after collecting more pictures, I decided to go for something more along the lines of the bottom two pictures. There isn't a reason why apart from the fact that I just liked the look of them more and that I thought they would be a better fit for my level.

I started with a cube and reshaped them and copied and pasted them. These two objects would be the support for the seat part of my chair. I then got a new cube and reshaped and rotated it. I used the insert edge-loop tool on it and selected 6 of the middle edges and moved them down a little. Then selected the middle 4 edges and moved them down a little more, and then the middle two and moved them down even more. I did this to create a bend since these chairs would naturally get a bend after people sitting on them for a long period of time. I'm aware that there are tools that can do this instead of me having to bend the object manually, however, I Don't know what tool and how to use the tool so that's why I did it like that. I then copies and pasted that object four times and aligned them evenly next to each other. I then added a cube and stretched it out vertically to create

one of the legs. I rotated it 45 degrees and placed it on one of the corners of the chair. I copied and pasted it 3 times and moved one of them to the other side of the chair, and the other two were rotated 90 degrees and placed on the remaining two corners. I again added another cube, elongated it vertically for the back support, rotated it 11.25 degrees, copied and pasted it, and moved one to the other side of the chair. I copied and pasted one of the bent seat objects twice and moved them to the back support part of the chair. I rotated them to fit them accordingly to the chair. I then added another cube and elongated it horizontally and copied and pasted that three times and placed them on the legs to stabilise the chair's legs, just like a chair would have in real life. I then added multiple spheres to the ends of each seat part and then combined all the objects together. To make the table I used the exact method of making the chair's legs but added a flat cylinder at the top.

I didn't have a clear idea of what I wanted the menu board to look like so I went on google images, google maps, and Artstation to help me get a clearer idea of what I wanted to do. I knew I wanted to make a menu for the window and a little menu board for the entrance. For the small menu board, I took most of the inspiration from the top right picture that I found on Artstation but I was still unsure what i was going to put on the menu.

I decided to play around on PowerPoint and look at the different fonts they had. I settled on this kind of fancy font. I wasn't sure if I should write a real menu in English, or if I should write one in a different language ideally a European language like Spanish or French. However, I made up my mind and thought I would write a menu that wasn't in any language, and that I would write completely made-up words. I decided to do this because my level wasn't based in a specific part of Europe and I didn't want to put a language that didn't fit the level. After writing a fake menu, I took a screenshot of it and imported it onto photoshop, and used a brush that looked like chalk. I then used it in the background of my text to make it look like someone had previously rubbed out the menu and rewritten it with chalk.

The chalkboard menu stand was fairly easy to model. I started as usual with a cube and reshaped it to the desired shape, I then got another cube and made it longer on one side. That cube would be the wood around the chalkboard. I copied and pasted this and moved it using the snap tool by pressing the x key on my keyboard, and placed it on the other side. I then pasted it again and reshaped it so it would fit the top side of the chalkboard and then copied and pasted

that to the bottom of the chalkboard. I then combined all of the models together by using the combine tool, and copied and pasted the model to make the back of the chalkboard. I then rotated both models at 22.5 degrees and combined both models together. I then simply added another cube and reshaped it to act as the support part of the menu, and combined all the models together again. I then went on UV Editor and rearranged the UVs and exported a UV snapshot onto photoshop. I then as usual used the select and paint bucket tool to colour in the UV map. I also added the same picture I used for the other menu for this menu but I cropped it so it would fit nicely onto the UV map. Everything was then imported into Unreal Engine.