Stray

Reproduction of Stray

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Context

This was my first school project designed within a month and a half with my classmate Amélie Franza.

The environment we have chosen to replicate is the main city from Stray.

Learning Unreal Engine 5 at the same time taught me that the time is one of the most valuable ressource in game development.

Challenge

The main thing that brings life to this world is the lightning with all of these neons.
The space of this aera is rather big and the deadline for this exercise was quite short.

Solution

For the production of the city, we opted for a template-based approach to get into a scale where it is easy to apply a repeatable texture with a texel density of 512 per square meter.
Neon lights were a particular factor in the level build of Stray and it led us to do the same. The main idea was to be able to change the color of a mesh without having to reapply a different instance of material which implies the use of custom primitive data.

Gallery

Primitive Data

Customs primitives data allowed us, once associated with a variable in the shader, to manipulate each asset individually without having to recreate a material instance.

This feature saves draw calls and artists do not need to use a limited color range due to ergonomic contraints.

Spline tool

This was a spline tool that was used for strings of light within the Level.

It uses Spline mesh component for the main cable and instanced static mesh component for lanterns positioning.

Some other features are included like random rotation, offset and emissive activation on the dynamic material instance.

Optimization

This environment made me more aware of some of games constraint as the Shader or the lighting complexity a of 3D scene

Furthermore, i have discovered the efficiency of templates modules for the level building and the assets production.

Designer

In the city level, the main identity is the colorful tiled facade so in order to quickly create a lot of iterations, I have choose to create these texture with Substance Designer.

Here they are some of them.

Other projects

Tech Art

Optimization

VFX

Level Build