​Interstellar Racing League (IRL)

Game Description:
Interstellar Racing League is a high-speed, 4 player racing experience. Players are racing along gravity-defying tracks through alien planets to compete for the title of the Galaxy’s Best Racer.

game trailer:

Development Info
Role: Environment and concept artist
Engine: Unreal Engine 4.17.2
​Genre: 3D 4 player racing game
Team Size: 60 developers (1 of 9 environment artists)
​Period: Feb 2018 – May 2018
 
Responsibilities
  • Created general concept art for the environment (4 levels include downtown, slum, desert and oasis level)
  • Concepted modular assets
  • Concepted landmark and game assets
  • Created seamless texture
  • Helped the team modelling landmark asset.
  • Helped the team placing props in the level
  • Created skybox material

Project Contribution:

General concept

These are concept of downtown and slum level that I created at the beginning of the project. The purpose of this is to help the team visualize the overall environment of the levels.

Landmark and modular building concept

After concepting general idea of the environment, I started to concept landmark buildings and modular building sets. The aim of concepting these are to explore interesting shape that fit the environment and the art style guide although some of them did not make it into the game. After I completed concept for the modular pieces, I drew a rough building layout for the level designers in the environment team. It was used to communicate to them how the building and assets should be placed in the level.

Landmark concept

​Other than buildings, I also created landmark concept as shown below. I decided to draw orthographic views and include a rough scale guide in the concept sheet, so that a person who model can understand clearly how the object should look like.
At the middle of the project when I concepted landmark pieces for the desert and oasis level, I decided to use a different technique. This time I started out by sketching the silhouette and refined them. Showing below are skull and bone concept for the desert level, and ruins concept for the oasis level. I also concepted canyon in the desert level for people who are responsible for the terrain to use as reference when sculpting.
​After finished concepting landmarks for all four levels, I noticed that we should make use of space on top of the screen by having a bridge or tunnel over the player. It will make the environment look more interesting when driving pass, so I concepted the landmark as shown below. ​​I got to model, unwrap, and texture these pieces. I used mask for the emissive part so that the color can be changed using material instance.

Texture

​Apart from concept, I was responsible for creating seamless texture for the assets. Example of the textures I made are bone, rock and sand texture. ​I also worked with a level designer in the team to create skyboxes in the levels. These are example of skyboxes from oasis, slum and desert level.

Post-mortems:

What Went Well
  • The number of concepts I made give the team choices to choose from.
  • Many of my concepts were made into the game.
  • Concepts that I made can communicate my thought to other artists well.

What Went Wrong
  • At the beginning of the project, priorities were very vague, and direction changed very frequent. This caused me having to throw away many planned tasks.
  • At the beginning of the project, I shared my general concept to both LDs and artists but for landmark concept, I only shared to the artist because I did not know that LDs also need it for reference.
  • When I applied my seamless texture to the atlas UV, I rescaled and cut it to fit the UV island without using mask. This made it difficult to adjust afterward.
  • There were times that I misunderstood things because I did not paraphrase my understanding to the person I talked.

What I Learned 
  • If the priorities were not clear, I should spend time consulting with the lead.
  • I should always share any concept art I create to the whole team.
  • I should always use mask when texturing.
  • I should always paraphrase my understanding to people I talk to and I should show my progress more often to avoid misunderstanding and having to redo work.