Call of Duty Atrium

Challenges

I had never made an environment this detailed up until this point
Unfamiliarity with new tools (Substance Designer)
Balancing art and design

Goals

Create an environment that can be seen as a believable play space for Call of Duty
Learn a better workflow for creating detailed environments.
Better myself with Unreal's tools (Lighting, Niagara, BSP)

Solo Developer
September 2021 - November 2021

Call of Duty scaled environment created in Unreal Engine 4 intended to show off level design, environment art, and texturing skills.

Intent

Created during my Environment Art class senior year at college, the Atrium is an environment meant to expand my prowess as a Level Designer while looking at problems through the lens of an artist. This was a class normally taken by students majoring in Art at my college, and therefore wasn't suited well for designers like myself, who worry more about player pathing and engagement rather than how well the lighting looks. Because of this, I challenged myself to go above and beyond with this assignment, creating an environment with strategically mapped points of engagement, correct scaling, and cover areas that were all taken directly from Call of Duty's own metric system.

Initial Blockout

Special care was taken during the blockout phase to make sure that every initial structural piece was to scale and could easily be taken into the next phase of production.

Even at this point, I was already starting to think about the future by planning ahead what pieces could be modular, where the most time should be put into, and minimizing the overall workload for portions that would never be seen.

Finalized Blockout

The version of the blockout that was used for creating the props. Creating using a combination of Unreal BSP and Modeling Toolkit

Player Engagement

To keep gameplay varied, the area is divided into two portions. The first (Pink Zone) is the Rifle Engagement Zone, which encourages longer-range gunplay across the whole arena. The second (Green Zone), marks the SMG Engagement Zone, where the player is encouraged to switch to a more close-range weapon to take into account the smaller, more condensed play-space.

The Finished Product

In the end, the finished product came out better than I expected for a several-week project. I achieved all my intended goals, including improving my workflow with BSP geometry, learning better modular-asset workflow methods, and drastically increasing my skills in lighting and optimization. There are still lots of improvements I can make however, like fleshing out the environment with more props, fixing the lack of texture variation in the walls/columns, and utilizing scans in a more meaningful way to add more interesting moss and debris.