The ArcSlinger - Main Menu

I was never told how to light the environment used for the main menu, but felt this needed to be set at night to quickly establish that this game is not a game set in the Old West...and, more importantly, not on Earth. The large cool star rising on the horizon is only visible at night, but provides a lighting quality unlike the morning sun..but, though I used a similar approach to bring a green-hued light to the night levels of Jak and Daxter, I decided against using unusual colors. This level helped me discover a look for the Arc rings...the initial concept was not working, so I rendered something in Maya that looked more like Saturn's rings. This look worked particularly well once I cast this planet's shadow upon it, rendered additional moons lit from the same direction, and then added the combined result into the night sky, hazed by Andrew's painted layers (which include atmospheric scattering and clouds).

The ArcSlinger - Level 01

The ArcSlinger - Level 02

The ArcSlinger - Level 03

The ArcSlinger - Level 04

The ArcSlinger - Level 05

When I was told we would have a rainy level, I started sweating bullets. Knowing that we were GPU bound, I did not know if we could commit to any material treatment that would allow the environment feel wet, certainly didn't want to risk having translucent rain drops, and forget about lightning. Well, I ended up adding just enough to imply such things. Through Blueprint, I keyed a Timeline to imply the fluctuation of a single lightning strike...then used a random scalar to vary delay and intensity, while randomly alternating its influence between the stationary directional light and the fog color (a value set via material parameter collection since we were not using UE4's atmospheric fog). I would have loved to do more, but this alone was already more than was expected...and it did not impact performance at all.

The ArcSlinger - Level 06

This level was originally created for vertical slice and went through many iterations before we got this within performance on device. I was initially asked to light this at high noon, but the harsh contrast was not helping the look (especially the characters) so I ended up giving a sunset palette with longer shadows that I really liked. But, when design finally settled upon an order of progression for the levels and story could be applied to the sequence, Bob provided a color story for the game that required that I light this environment as night. I preserved the key light's direction, but used the main menu's settings to change it to the cool star with soft area shadows. Overall I am still pleased with how this level turned out. The source lights from each building certainly look better at night.

The ArcSlinger - Level 07

The ArcSlinger - Level 08

The ArcSlinger - Level 09

The ArcSlinger - Level 10

The ArcSlinger - Level 11

The ArcSlinger - Level 12

The ArcSlinger - Level 13

Already GPU bound, adding vertex blending between multiple textures was not a realistic option. When Bob suggested snow should fall on latter levels, I initially told the team they would have to create it in their textures...but our need to heavily rely upon few materials with atlased textures to keep draw calls low pretty much negated any chance of seeing snow in the game. When I finally got around to lighting the latter environments, I felt they were lacking something to differentiate them...so I quickly mocked up a top-down material that simply blended the diffuse color towards white (so I wouldn't need to sample from any additional textures). Given that our game was stylized, I didn't feel that our base materials needed much more than a vertex channel mask (which I baked directly into the merged version of our assets and further hand-painted so that snow wouldn't appear in areas that it should not).

The ArcSlinger - Level 14

This is the second level I applied the snow material to, but I decided not to have it fall on the metallic structures (figuring heat generated from underlying machinery would have prevented it from sticking). As this level was set at night, I used the stationary directional light to imply illumination from the bright beam...and, having proven I could afford to vary the intensity of the stationary light's map in an earlier level, added a throbbing pulse (I keyed an animation curve in a Timeline that I hooked up to the level's sky Blueprint and added a random scalar so that the intensity would vary with each loop). Andrew painted a great snowcapped mountain range for this level's sky dome...and I dropped in additional elements including the shadowed arc rings, a northern lights-like auroral overlay, stars, and a haze that, given the fixed viewpoint of the VR camera, appears to emanate from the beam all the way into space.

The ArcSlinger - Level 15

The ArcSlinger - Grave