Introduction to GAR204

BRIEF:

This assignment is an assessment of your Art Research skills, your ability to choose and research a game art topic, experiment and create artefacts, information and assets for your own learning outcomes.

This assignment is an assessment of your Art Research skills, your ability to choose and research a game art topic, experiment and create artefacts, information and assets for your own learning outcomes.

Research Question

How do videogames utilise skyboxes and cloud systems to create an atmosphere outside of the main traditional geometry/ interactable content.

__________

Course/Route

BA(Hons) Game Art - Environment

__________

Project Details and Learning Goals

Explore professional workflows and systems behind the creation of skyboxes/ cloud systems within the medium of video games. With the goal of creating my own engaging atmospheres outside of the traditional modelled and interactable level content.

Create a collection of engaging pieces/ studies that do not rely upon modelled assets but instead tell a story or convey a mood using atmospheric industry informed techniques.

__________

Rationale

An often-overlooked element of games is their utilisation of clouds, skyboxes and how the often un-interactable element that is the sky can be used as an incredibly powerful tool when creating a visual identity and mood communication technique. This is one element that has always fascinated me especially within the context of traditional art, photography pieces or even everyday life so applying that interest to videogames will help create more visually unique bodies of work in the future.

Being nearly always onscreen in some capacity within many games, the un-interactable helps push worldbuilding and a sense of scale that exceeds the playable spaces that players inhabit. Certain we’ve all had experiences within games where imagination runs wild or thoughts of “What is outside of this level or what goes on over there in the unreachable spaces” it’s what makes glitching into a supposedly inaccessible sections of a game so exciting.

__________

To achieve this I will:

- Study the work of traditional artists such as Albert Bierstadt and John Martin and interpret how they handled the sky to convey a feeling within their bodies of work.

- I will explore the use of industry software such as: Houdini, EmberGen, Vue, Unreal Engine and Terragen and discover how these packages can inform my own workflow.

- Seek reference and first-hand research from my own real-life photos and attempt replicative studies to enhance realism, understanding and believability of produced work.

- Research how games/developers such as Destiny (Bungie), Warframe (Digital Extremes), Horizon (Guerilla Games) or even side scrollers such as Mario (Nintendo) have approached the sky through the years of tech progression and hardware divides.

Using all of this to inform my own workflow that can be utilised in future projects.