Level Assembly & Lighting: Separate March Update

Throughout this month I took two courses, one more valuable than the other for the discipline I've chosen but so be it. I came into this school with a terrible preconception as to what environment art was and although the environment art course that we took 6 months prior  reassured me I might enjoy LVL. However it was a complete derail of what I thought initially. 

There were still a few good things from the course itself. Such as the second and third weeks where we used modular assets to create levels by optimizing the textures used using color ID maps. The substance designer workflow we used could set up mesh UV's and faces to have certain portions for textures. Much like a grayscale mask but with multiple channels of colors for multiple textures. 

This allowed us to create this building only using 9 assets which include the lamp on it's own texture sheet. We also used fake lighting and emissive maps to to fake lighting instances where lights vary in brightness and color. 

  

We we're also able to create the same effects using 3 texture sets and the same emissive instance in this ceramic hallway project we worked on the week after. To go from basic lighting results in this image. 

To this with just emissive and light instancing makes the whole project move faster. I think most students finished the whole assignment in about 8 hours when we had the whole week to work on it.