Irfancg

Hi Fellas, welcome to my second post, in this post I’ll share with you about my experience as a Level Artist. I need to remind you this is just base on my experience who work on levels from the Open world level to Arena or Linear level for almost three years, so any input or advice are very welcome.

The game developer community is awesome. It gave me so much help through my studies, and that's why I decided to take the time to give back. I hope this will help some people, please enjoy it.

Like I’ve said in the first post, I began my career as a Level and Environment Artist, I’m originally a hard surface modeler, designing and modelling robot or futuristic stuff as a hobby, and suddenly my Lead Artist want me to do Level which is very new to me. But in the end I’m very thankful that my Lead gave me this great opportunity. Because as a modeler I can improve my technical skill, not just learning about the looks or the details, but also about the performance and the engine limitation.


Talk about Level artist it is different from studio to studio, but in general Level Artist is a set skill to design and create art for the levels that the player will play through in the game, understanding of game mechanics, 3D space, art, lighting, and performance.


A.    Where do I start?

Usually I start with a plan and write it on paper or Notepad. Without planning you'll probably end up wasting time, don't waste your time on details when you're not sure if the general idea will work, make it simple to describe, so the others can be understood as well.

Prototyping, still make it simple if you’re not sure the general idea will work, but try to focus on the geometry in scale and implement any gameplay that you can, this is the best time for you to improve the layout, scale and performance.

Art time! when everything works like you and your team wanted, it’s time to adding the details, do the modeling, sculpting and texturing but keep an eye on performance and do the lighting.

Optimizing, make sure there is no room for wasting memory. For example, I usually open all my test folder where I do testing and experiment, and just delete all the un-use files.

Testing, make sure your level works good and looks good, finding and fixing the bug as much as possible. We play, we test and we learn, then test it again until the last minutes.


B.    The Level Design Challenge!

I like to call it challenge instead of a problem, it’s motivated me to solve the problem.

I.    First Challenge! Idea

My ideas of level art design usually from a combination of other games, movies and my real life experiences, the idea should be base on benefit for the game not base on individual ego. Of course, the idea is base on your experiences and your knowledge, but it’s important to keep an open mind and trust people around you to help. Because in my experience everybody can have the idea, but some people just give the idea without knowing the engine limitation, how can you transfer all the detail with a hardware limitation? How will frame rate be affected? All these factors you have to think when you plan out your level. Don’t forget if you working in the team, you have to listen and respect your teammate, because Level Artist is like hub position, you will work closely with programmer, concept artist, lighting artist etc. So my tips to get an idea is make a prototype, make sure you and others are happy and then you will find the best idea for your design.

II.    Second Challenge! Background Art

This is challenging and complicated tasks, each environment usually starts by creating simple shapes like boxes or cylinders in a 3D to describe gameplay spaces and platforms. We will use this simple mesh to create a level, test the gameplay and the player or AI path. You will work with the concept art team to develop a look and feel for the level, then the modeler will start modeling base on the simple mesh and keep an eye on performance.

III.    Third Challenge! Bug

The common issue when you designing the level is from the collision, the player can be floating or even stuck, and it will affect the NavMesh Map or AI Path and the gameplay of course.


I’ll explain few important things that you need to know about how the collision work specifically in Unreal Engine 4 through images. Concave, Intersection and Pivot, these three things are commonly causing the problem for the collision.


Avoid Concave!



The player will be floating.



Beware of Intersection!



Pivot!
Make sure your pivot for the collision is final, if you or someone change the pivot all the entire levels are gonna be messed up.

IV.    Fourth Challenge! Optimizing

There are a lot of tricks to optimize your level, but I think I don’t have to explain all of them, Ain't nobody got time for that.


But I'll give you some important tips that can help you to optimize your Level.

For the Material and the Static Mesh, the method that you can use is using instances or modular kit, this is saves modeling time since you can standardize elements for the Material and the Asset.

For the texture, I usually using RGB Channel method. Textures like Metallic, Roughness, Specular, Displacement, Ambient are using black and white color only. So I just combine at least three of them in one texture. For example :


Using the square “power of two” texture (for example: 256x256/1024x1024), some hardware has limited support for textures that don’t have the power of two dimensions. They’ve been designed to process them in that way, today most card will allow you to load textures with non-power of two dimensions, but it will have a negative impact on your performance.


Still for the texture, usually I reduce the Normal map size into a half from the Diffuse size if needed. For example, if my Diffuse map is 2K (2048x2048), my normal map will be 1K (1024x1024) so technically it’s not half but four times smaller and saves four times memory.


Since the Normal map has reduced, I’m using Smart Sharpen in Photoshop in order to increase the quality look of the Normal map. For optimizing the shader, you can read my first post here.

V.    Fifth Challenge! Be Organized

Level art design it’s very tedious job, you didn’t want to add more problem later, so being organized it’s very helpful. You need to learn about Naming Convention, folder management etc, it makes you and others work easier.

I need to remind you again that my post here is not to explain everything about Level Art Design, Level Design process is more complicated and sometimes painful, there is a lot of things that I need to learn and experience it, not just from art perspective but also from every different aspect and multi-discipline. Be more creative and love to learn, because in reality technology always changing and improving, but here's what I believe "you can change the hardware you can change the software but you can’t change the creativity". So it’s really important to keep an open mind for personal improvement.

Thanks for your time to read my blog, hope it help and have a great day.

Irfan CG,

-Level and Environment Artist-