[Student Work] Hidden Temple - Unreal Engine Environment Design
In this project I created a Tomb Raider inspired level design in Unreal Engine. The player traverses a forest to reach a hidden underground temple, which requires the player to solve puzzles to enter. For the sake of this demo, I simulated the logic of the puzzles with keybinds. My process also covers the steps I took to optimize the game level. The purpose of this project was to practice environment art and using visual cues to guide the player, and also to get the hang of Unreal Engine and game optimization.
Originally made in August 2023
Gameplay demo video
Final look of the game demo areas
Moodboard and concept art. Before reaching the temple proper, the player will have to traverse a forest and cave first. I also generated an image for the temple using Stable Diffusion.
Using simple building blocks, I planned out the general layout and flow of the level and terrain. I made my own simple tree meshes to deal with importing or performance in this stage.
To optimise the level, I checked multiple facets of the level: light complexity, quads, material complexity, and lightmap density among other things. Each of these were already fine from the the get-go.
As part of my optimisation process, I also organised the outliner and content folder.
The asset pack I used didn’t come with UVs for some of the assets, which I had to manually redo in Maya. I also used Maya to manually replace the high quality LODs for ones of a lower quality for light baking.
Precomputing visibility showed a large improvement in mesh calls. For light baking, there were a large number of settings I had to adjust from the default lumen sample project.
Before and after light baking and optimisation for the woods area.
Before and after light baking and optimisation for the temple ruins area.