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What is Sewerpunk?
Sewerpunk is my Senior Project for the Animation BFA from my time at California State University, Long Beach. It is a slice of an environment for an imagined game in the vein of open world RPG’s such as Cyberpunk 2077 and Fallout 4. It takes place in a toxic city, in an alternate universe, years in the future. The city is flooded with dangerous chemicals, which caused the downfall of the natural world. Is there any nature left? Who knows. For the time being humanity must survive in this bleak world, living in concrete and metal structures to shield them from the toxins that they themselves have created.
Reference and Inspiration
The first step of the process for creating this environment was collecting references and inspiration from other media sources. This was vital moving forward for visual development, as it was the foundation for the mood and aesthetic of the environment.
Visual Development
I began visual development for this project during a perspective drawing class through an assignment where we were tasked to create a “post-apocalyptic” environment for our final. Over the weeks following the conclusion of the class, I continued developing the ideas further, finally landing on a look and feel I was happy with.
This version was the initial version of the environment. Because it was made for a perspective drawing class I ended up making it much more rectilinear rather than the more organic feel of the final version.
I wanted to further develop the shape language of the buildings moving forward, creating more organic structures more akin to the initial mood board. Much of my research for building design came from Machinarium and SpongeBob. I also decided a color scheme centered around everyone's favorite color: chartreuse.
Asset Development (Modeling & Texturing)
Finally, I began work on the actual assets for the environment. This started out with creating the layout in Maya.
Layout
Luckily, in order to create visual development for the project, I already had a scene in Maya that I used to block out the composition. By taking those initial structures and refining them I ended up with a landscape that was faithful to the initial vision of Sewepunk, while also having another pass to clean up problematic areas.
Modular Pieces
Once I had the main building blocks in place, I began work on modular pieces. This included doors, windows, ACs, utility poles, and other miscellaneous objects that I could reuse around the map. Along with this I made many of the buildings out of modular pieces that could be reshaped and reconstructed to create new buildings with the same shape language. Not only did this save me time during the modeling and texturing process, but also saved valuable resources for the texture pool size when importing into the Unreal Engine.
Unreal Engine Implementation
Finally, it was time to put all of the assets together in one scene. Although I had only used the Unreal Engine a couple times before, I quickly got a hang of how to best utilize the tool. This process allowed me to dip my toes in the Unreal node editor, where I was able to create blueprints for the water effects as well as spline based meshes for the wires, allowing me to quickly and easily change where their start and endpoints connected, there are still a few bugs I need to address when it comes to packaging the game but as of now, they all work as intended in the Unreal Engine 5 editor. Once I squash those bugs I look forward to uploading the demo to this site so all of you have a chance to play Sewerpunk on your devices at home! I also played around with adding small details like puddles and fog which added some extra spice to the scene overall. I did reorganize the layout quite a bit from the original concept, and I am pretty happy with how it all came together!
Alternate Lighting
In order to show the versatility of the environment I decided to try some renders using a different lighting set up. This helps create a new time of day and seasonal shift from the original dark nights of the first version to a polluted summer in the same universe.
