Boundless Skies
This was a Pro Production course at SCAD which I was asked to help out with. Their art direction was fully focused towards stylized with shaders in UE5. However, no one on the team knew how to create this (of course)… So, I joined on and helped the team create with a stylized PBR methodology instead.
Boundless Skies central hub area. The game is a roguelike sort of village unlock progression game. From what I understood the player starts on an island and as they travel to new islands, they unlock new gear, new merchants, etc.
I created all of the foliage for the game in an attempt to salvage their desire to have a cell shaded type of stylized game. They were using reference images from a game called "Solarpunk" which uses stylized PBR modeling and cell shaded trees.
Here are some trees which I made using TreeIt.
The bushes in the same way.
Logs were modeled in Z and retopo'd in Maya. Then hand painted in Substance Painter.
Same with the rocks.
I also created a few key props to help the art team get started with the custom materials from Substance Designer.
This model honestly ended up with too much detail but it's what I used to teach the rest of the art team.
I also tried to show them all how to re-use the pre-existing environment work to create original shapes and blend in the landscape mesh in UE5.
I blocked out the level-1 environment using the landscape tool and quickly added a few key props. The rest of the team took this area and added objectives based on the level design teams plans.
Once the objective markers were placed, I threw in a bunch of foliage so that I could do some simple load-unload optimizations.
And then I began to set dress the world to make it feel like a rugged and abandoned sky island.
Here's a wide image of the landing area for level 1.
The top-down view.
Heres what the central hub looked like before I was brought onto the project.
Aaand, after.
Very proud of these guys. They were able to accomplish a lot from scratch, and I think everyone was doing their best!