MineCraft Level Design

I wanted to try something challenging. My plan was to learn best practices for UV unwrapping and mapping set-up in Maya, creating textures in Photoshop, practicing whiteboxing and lighting in UE4.

I had originally looked for inspiration from Lord of The Rings and the Dwarven home in the mountain and was looking to make some sort of "dungeon" environment - So I whiteboxed / used BSP brushes in UE4 to plan what I wanted to do.

I of course completely scrapped this idea and looked for something more within scope.

I found an amazing interior location from Paris..

This particular image shows a room well-lit and full of life and vibrant beauty. I wanted a space that borrowed from the really cool architecture, but instead felt a bit more ominous -- aiming for a Castle Wolfenstein vibe. 

I first worked at creating a base cube, slicing and UV Mapping in Maya.

Then I worked on creating a small library of textures I could use to fill out my scene. In retrospect I should have planned out which textures I would need beforehand...but heck, it was good practice.

I started out with BSP brushes and basic UE4 assets to get the layout of what I wanted and feel the size of the space before final build and texturing.

I made a first pass, but the space felt a bit empty and the lighting wasn't particularly eye-pleasing.

Then I added some torches, but they were a bit too RED.

So i changed things up and tried to get a bit more contrast with the lighting and casting some shadows across the scene, along with adding a 'flicker' to the torches.

I also added a 'secret bookshelf' along the back wall that slides away to reveal a secret room. I attempted to highlight it with brighter sconches and a white book in the bookshelf, the only one present in the scene.

Here is the tutorial I followed for the light-flicker effect:

Light Flicker Blueprinting

The sliding door tutorial is show in the Unreal Tutorial Playlist here:

Sliding Door Blueprint

I've included a walkthrough of my level. I noticed some artifacting, which I believe is a result of rendering issues due to the large number of actors in my scene, but I will need to keep a better eye on maintaining optimal level size.

Included is a short walkthrough of the level: