Keep It Simple, Stupid!

My stretch of time off is nearing an end but I managed to do quite a lot in these 1-2 weeks! I finished cleaning up nearly 2 full maps and I’ve never done even 1 map in that amount of time before!

I’ve completed “The Outskirts” map and I’m really happy with how it turned out. It was one of the first maps I did years ago and I actually dreaded coming back to it because I realized that I had to redo a lot of things. For example, when I started using UE4 I didn’t use the Landscape tool to create large areas of land but instead I created the whole thing in Blender, chopped it up into several huge chunks and imported the land as staticmeshes. Now, there isn’t really anything wrong with that method but it can be limiting and not as flexible as using UE4‘s built-in Landscape tool which allows you to make changes to the terrain on the fly.

I had to update all that and thought it was going to take forever but it turned out to be pretty easy. I had to repaint all the foliage onto the terrain again, realign old staticmeshes like rocks and buildings but it was all fairly quick. For the fans of the mod, you’ll recognize this map as taking place at night where Donovan tries to sleep in an abandoned truck but it’s too cold and he tries to start a fire.

This is based off of that map (or rather, what that map should have looked like back then!) and it occurs in the early evening this time. According to the story you’ll have to fulfill some objectives like finding a suitable place to rest and building a fire to keep warm until dark (Donovan needs to wait here until midnight for something to happen)

I chose certain colors to make it seem as cold as possible (we’re in mid-Autumn by now) and tried to keep things uncluttered. Keeping it simple is a difficult thing for me to do because I like to go overboard and cram as much shit as I can into every scene but in this case it would have ruined the realism of an area like this. K.I.S.S principle!