Life Unfolds is a charming, emotional game that captures the best moments in life. It's about growing up, learning skills, and creating memories with friends and family. The game is a UE4 project developed by myself and eleven others at the Florida Interactive Entertainment Academy. Life Unfolds was recently voted the best FIEA game in the school’s 10 year existence. As the Lead Technical Artist, I was responsible for the creation and optimization of the visual effects, lighting, shadowing, vegetation animation, and house models.
The lighting and shadows in Life Unfolds was achieved primarily by one movable directional light attached to the top of the player. An additional skylight with a surrounding cubemap was added to increase the intensity of the light all around. The shadows created from the directional light are assisted by a large post-process volume that adds a gentle ambient occlusion to the world.
Originally, when the game was being developed for both PCs and tablets, we had to stay away from movable lights in UE4. This meant we would have to bake the lighting with static and stationary lights to illuminate a round world. Placing multiple lights all over a sphere to get even lighting and non-conflicting shadows is downright near impossible. It was a huge relief when mobile development got scrapped and I could use dynamic lighting instead!
The following screens are environment models I constructed in Maya to fit in with our papercraft theme. Textures completely done by Anna Stavropoulos and Lauren Hanchin.
Early on we had to make a decision on how to go about crafting a round planet in Unreal. We played with the idea of breaking the world up into sections, but in the end we went with a cube deformed into a sphere for easier texturing and less stretching. We also experimented with the possibility of modular pieces; however, my Bulge-Deformer Tool allowed for the artists to bend geometry to conform to round surface of the planet.
This is a collection of concept models I fabricated for town houses in the world's neighborhood. These screens are from early in the development process where we were still figuring out the papercraft style we wanted to go with.
