Liminal Detective

Team: 9 | Time Period: 10 Weeks

Tools Used : Unreal Engine 5, Blueprints, Unreal Material Editor, Substance Painter 3D, Subversion

Description

Liminal Detective is a 3rd person murder mystery where you fight your way through a haunted manor with your telekenetic powers. This project was a semester long project made for my Studio 2 class in my junior year of Champlain College. I handled a big majority of the art direction creating atmospherics, lighting, stylized post processing effects, VFX, and shaders.

What I Learned

Everything connects TOGETHER: To create a cohesive art direction, it isn't just lighting and atmospherics, it's everything together. Making sure there is a clear path for not just lighting and atmospherics (although important), but look at your materials, vfx, and your shaders as well. Make sure the theming is consistent and everything works together to uplift the project.
Stylization Works: Utilizing a specific art stylization can be such a hand at creating a cohesive direction and overall feeling of polish, we created a paint stroke normal map generator for all of our textures as well as a painterly post processing effect, those two combined really help make the world feel good and the look we were looking for.
Use Your Internal Feedback: Going through multiple passes of iteration is important, so ask your teammates, even if they don't have neccessarily an artistic eye, it is important to get multiple perspectives to help give a path on where to improve.