Context of Practice 3: Creating the Environment Part 1

Once I knew where everything was going to be going I moved onto actually creating my own environment which is shown below. It took me only a short amount of time to get the shape of the terrain that I wanted and I was quickly very happy with the overall look. For now I did just slap on some textures to create a feeling that it was set in the winter and ensured that I had the proper lights in place to be able to cast the necessary shadows and darkness across the scene.  

I then looked at adding in my snow to the scene. I really did like the snow I created before and added it in again using the same settings so that I got it looking exactly how I wanted. I stretched it over the part of the map that the character would be walking around and tested to see if I liked the look so far.

The snow at the moment was very dense and I had to use a lot of particles to be able to get it falling as heavy as I desired and found that this was really slowing the level down so I really wanted to come up with a better way of adding it into the scene. I also at this time was steering away from the puzzle aspect and really wanted to bring in the exploration element that would make the player be able to explore more of the scene, but again this would require more particles and at this time it wasn't an option.

I then put the particles to one side slightly so that I could focus more on the rest of the scene first to try and make some progress. At this stage I had already added in a couple of objects that would appear, without textures at the moment, in my scene. I then moved onto looking at adding in fog into the scene. For this I used the fog setting in the complete

I then added in the Northern Lights that I had been practicing creating. I was rather happy with the shape that I had already created that weaved through the sky and really liked how it looked, I just wasn't that keen on the texture of it so knew that was one of the first things that would have to be changed. I started by looking at games that had already tried creating the Northern Lights in their own games for inspiration and did find that Assassins Creed: Rogue was the closest to what I wanted to achieve.

I took a lot of inspiration from it but found that it still looked a bit jagged and I wasn't too keen on the overall look. I then did end up changing the colours around quite a lot throughout the whole process but at this stage focused on the shape.

I then flatten them almost to create this streak through the sky which I think looks a lot better. I then added another one and altered this one so that you can see the streaks running through it a little more.

Some more colours where then added and I got them looking really nice in the end, and by adding in the fog you can't see the end of them, making them appear to melt into the distance.

When looking back at my game level I found that I really didn't like the look of the snow, it didn't blow enough in the wind and was really not looking great. When playing through the first couple of missions in Far Cry 4 you get to go to the Himalaya's and the snow looks fantastic in this section and I really like how blustery it makes the scene look. There is also the addition of some really nice dust clouds that come in every now and again just adding to the realism of the scene and making it beautiful.

After looking at Far Cry 4 in some more detail I decided that I really liked the look of the snow and wanted to go back and change mine. It was fairly simple, especially after doing the test with rain, as it meant that I could get the snow falling a lot faster but still float around in the air at the same time. Now I am very happy with the overall snow look and think it looks fantastic, the only thing I then did was, again like with the rain test that I did, make the snow appear in a box mesh but attach it to the first person controller so that I could get the snow to fall everywhere the player looks and the box is big enough that it looks like the snow is still falling everywhere.

Now that I had the snow working how I wanted I really wanted to make the world bigger and allow the player to be able to walk around some more of the environment. This was getting me really excited to continue but I knew that this meant fixing the textures further in order to walk around further. This was a fairly simple job and I mainly used a snow texture everywhere before adding in extra elements like mud and bluer looking snow to the stepper edge of the mountains just to give it a bit of extra colour.

I then played the level through and found that with the dense fog that I had set up you could no longer see the northern lights in the sky due to the distance of visibility. I got around this eventually after playing around a lot with the settings. Eventually I also added in a ambient light into the scene which I used to make the whole environment even darker. I think it really added a lot into the scene and I also gave it a blue hint to try and bring some colour into the scene and bring a sense of coldness and loneliness.

As you can see below the lights are visible again.

I then wanted to look at how fast the Northern Lights actually move as there are many videos that show it moving very quickly as they have sped up the footage but I found this nice video of the lights in Sweden showing that they barely move at all and it is over a long period of time where they finally show there movement. I really like this video and tried to use it as a base for the animation on mine which I eventually looped in Unity so that it was continuously moving.

I then looked at this video as well as it shows the amount of colour variation that you can get in the lights which has prompted me to choose the colours that I did. I think this is a beautiful video and shows them in their true glory.

Below is then the first video play through of the environment at this stage. At the moment I am very happy with the look but it's far too light at the moment, and the environment looks very bleak and doesn't have a lot in it. It looks very boring at the moment, but as it is at the moment, I think it's coming along nicely and I can see how it will mold into the final result.