Old Mental Asylum - Group Project

This blog is dedicated to an older group project which I have worked on with Sam & Jack Hartley.

We have chose to create an old mental asylum which has an operating theatre and is set in an old abandoned mansion.

Unfortunately, we were too ambitious with the scale of this project so we never got to properly finish it as we have all had to move onto different projects. The following images present areas of the environment which were mostly finished and some which were left in a very early stages of development.

Roles

Simon Olsavsky (ArtStation) - Responsible for the props, modular asset design and creation, environment assemble and all things Unreal Engine                                                  related.

Sam Hartley (ArtStation) - responsible for the props.

Jack Hartley (ArtStation) - responsible for the character.

Environment

When approaching this environment, we have used modular workflow. The idea was that we will spend majority of the time working on the operating theatre and the hallway leading up to it and by the end, we will have enough modular pieces and assets to build out the rest of the mansion. Unfortunately, making and planning of the modular assets took way longer than I have initially anticipated and we had run out of time.

The operating theatre room was heavily inspired by The Old Operating Theatre in London.

(Reference Image - The Old Operating Theatre - London - St. Thomas Church)

All the floor pieces share one material ID. I had made couple of different variations of the floor with different planks missing, one variation which missed all the planks. I have also imported all the planks into the engine as a separate assets so I could then scatter them around.  

(Reference Image - The Old Operating Theatre - London - St. Thomas Church)

Props

These are the props which were made by me. I have only done a small amount of props as my main task was designing and making of the modular assets, as well as assembly of environment in the Unreal Engine. (Image frames on the wall were made by Sam)

To make this prop, I have started by modelling a small section which I have then unwrapped in a way so that the texture would tile horizontally. Once I had the texture for the small section of the prop done, I have extruded all the pieces to a desired length while preserving the UVs, added some edges and then used the bend modifier to make the bend in the middle. The whole prop is made out of 2 material IDs. I was later able to re-use the white painted planks texture on some of the walls in the operating theatre room, this was done to reduce the amount of draw calls in the scene.

Props made by Sam - ArtStation

Modular Assets

The Mansion

As I have mentioned before, we were planning on making the rest of the mansion out of the modular pieces which were created for the hallway and the operating theatre room. However, we have not got past the initial design stage of the mansion reception area. It ended up being just a test of what could be quickly assembled with the modular pieces already created. 

Mafia - Before/after

Now that the updated version of my older Mafia project has been published, I have decided that instead of completely removing the images of the old version from my ArtStation, I'll instead move them to this blog. This way I can preserve the old images and show some of the before and after changes which I had done.

Right away, you can see that the brick textures were replaced and a new pathway was assembled out of Megascans assets. Additionally, the window frame models were replaced with a more detailed assets and a better looking blinds. The wooden balcony on the left has also gone through some small changes. I have slimmed down the wooden beams which support it and I have introduced some more randomness by moving some wooden planks around. Some props were moved and some were added. This was done to fill out the environment and to also more closely match the original environment from the 2002 Mafia game. 

The biggest change I have done to this environment is change of light setup and introduction of weather effects. Weather effects were achieved using the Sky Creator Plugin from Unreal Marketplace. This plug in was also the reason why I have returned to this project. I wanted to try it out and learn how it works on an older environment first before attempting to use it in a completely new environment. 

As I mentioned earlier, the balcony has gone through some changes which are easier to spot in this close up shot. 

This video was made in the old version of the environment and shows some additional areas of the environment which I have left as they were in this new version.