Project Erebus MiniBlog – Art Complete

Posted on 23 August, 2014 by Admin

We missed our blog post and Screenshot Saturday last week because I was feverishly trying to get all of the art assets finished. Well, as of yesterday afternoon, the art milestones for Project Erebus are complete! – two months ahead of schedule no-less.

This is going to be another short post as we’ll be transitioning to making the actual environments for the game starting today.

And here’s a full set of screenshots for the zones that we’ve built test scenes for, featuring a zone we haven’t shown before: the caverns beneath the museum. Some of the art for the Egypt exhibit has been re-done to bring it more in-line with the other art.

Remember, these are just art test-beds, not actual zones for the game – some are less fleshed-out than others.

Unreal Engine Tips & Tricks

Posted on 12 August, 2014 by Admin

So it’s time for another post; this time we’ll be looking at a few features of the Unreal Engine 4 editor that you may not know about that could increase your productivity. We use most of these features on a daily basis and can’t imagine working without them.

While in simulation mode (Alt + S), you can keep the changes made to any actor by selecting it/them and pressing ‘K’ (alternatively, Right-click > Keep Simulation Changes). Usually, in simulate mode, any changes made are lost when you drop back out; but this lets you keep them for specific actors. Combined with physics, this means you can easily stack/scatter objects in a realistic way by enabling ‘Simulate Physics’ on a group of actors, let them fall in simulate mode, and then keep their new positions.
Press ‘End’ to snap an actor to the surface below it.
Ctrl + End snaps actors back to the grid.
Ctrl + Number keys (not numpad) bookmarks a camera position, pressing the number keys (without holding Ctrl) moves the camera to the corresponding bookmarked position.
Pressing ‘F’ frames a selected actor to your viewport.
Ctrl + P opens an asset menu where you can search for assets and drag them into the scene without going through the content browser.
Holding Alt while moving (or rotating) an actor will duplicate it. Holding Shift while moving an actor will make the editor camera follow along.
Right-clicking a vertex of a brush will snap it to the grid (only if positional grid snapping is enabled).
Using the ‘[‘ and ‘]’ keys will increment/decrement the positional snapping grid size.
Copying an object to the clipboard will copy it in a readable text format, allowing you to copy between levels/projects, share actor settings with other people, and make changes by hand before pasting back into the level.

Project Erebus MiniBlog – Demonology Exhibit Art

Posted on 10 August, 2014 by Admin

Just a small update today: the art to be used in the demonology exhibit is just about done, this brings us to around 77% of the art complete (although we expect more art to be needed that we haven’t accounted for).

Now that the level whiteboxing is done and the art is almost complete, we should be able to build the actual levels for the game starting next week.

Here’s a quick demo scene we put together in an hour or two to showcase the art that will be going into the demonology exhibit:

As a side note: the sigil in the center of this room comes from the Arcane Runes Photoshop & GIMP Brushes pack by obsidiandawn. They have some amazing brushes, patterns, and other images.

Project Erebus DevBlog #2 – Art Preview (Forest, Egypt, Norse & Atlantis)

Posted on 1 August, 2014 by Admin

It’s been a long time since our last post. We had to stop working on the game for a little while but now we’re back with an art preview for four of the zones in erebus (the first 3 exhibits + an outdoor area).

In total there are 10 visually distinct zones in the game (6 of which are exhibit areas). We wanted to make each area interesting and obviously different from the others and decided that making each exhibit themed to match what was on display was the best way to achieve that. Each zone had to be eerie in its own way.

There’s a lot of artwork involved in this game, I’d say the art assets easily take up most of the development time. In hindsight, developing a heavily-art-based game might not have been the greatest idea we (as a two-man team, with no artist) have had.

Anyway, this post is a little short on information, so here’s a couple of screenshots and a video showcasing the first three exhibits of the museum.