Lore of Thuja
Bachelors thesis exploring environment art concepts
Lore of Thuja
A passion project in the beginning of 2017 where I spent loads of time trying to learn more about environment art.
Environmental storytelling
For my bachelors thesis I decided to research the strength of storytelling through environmental design. I’m not gonna dwelve down into that whole thesis, but it involved a lot of traditional ways of leading the player through levels by guidance of light and color, meaning I had to build a game world. Now how do you do that?
Concepting world building
For many months I deep dove into world creation. Now I’ve built levels before for many years as a hobby, but I’ve never really had full creative freedom.
How do I avoid using traditional terrains with height maps? How do I use modular blocks? How does various ways to build a world affect performance? Is there a way to do it that was not been done before?
You might say I explored some pretty weird methods, such as creating large chunks modular pieces, using systems to sew them together inside Unity to singular meshes that would later be cut up into squares, and more.
Eventually I’d find out why this isn’t the norm for world building and why you’d use a terrain and just place assets on it. However, this is done everywhere and used in a boring way in my opinion. It just feels cheap and unimaginative.
I wanted to find some other cool way of doing it. After all, that’s what thesies are for - to research and try things!
I’ve never really been fond of the traditional pipeline of level creation in games. It’s so divided up in roles making it split up between different minds, and everyone might see a different end product.
I thought; What would happen if you gave an artist all the creative freedom possible? Ignoring level blockouts? Yep, it’s a bit unorthodox…
…luckily though, this wasn’t an actual real game development! but rather a time to explore ways to do it differently.
Sketching out worlds by using 3D assets directly in engine, rather than a traditional placeholder/blockout scene being replaced by finished assets surely was interesting. It helped a lot with “concepting” out a look that we wanted. The image here features no terrain at all. It’s all modular assets placed together to form a piece of world.
But yeah, as time went on I started understanding why the terrain piece is so important as a foundation piece. I started looking into using terrains with my modular pieces.
I saw how some games did this in a nice way, fusing together pieces that can’t be sculpted in a terrain, onto the terrain, creating a nice variety in geometry. It meant I didn’t need to build the entire world with a bunch of floating islands sewn together.
Simply creating a shader that would mimic the world position placement from the terrain grass would allow me to place pieces and fuse them together with the terrain like this, creating a way more interesting world.
I tend to see in a lot of games but without the fusing, making it really easy to tell them apart and I find that kind of lazy.
This later went on to become this pretty little piece of world. A world with very elevated and dense geometry with several areas hard to tell apart terrain from modular pieces. For being a project from 4 years ago as of writing (2021), I am very happy with spending so much time on researching this as it gave me a big push for where I am today in skills of environment creation.
Looking back at it today, it’s not the prettiest thing, but I did learn a ton.