Delivery At Dusk Art

Delivery at Dusk Art Synopsis

This project was artistically demanding due to the sheer volume of assets required, so I approached the art with an emphasis on speed, flexibility, and scalability. I leaned heavily on procedural workflows to support rapid iteration as the world evolved alongside the design.

All visual decisions were guided by the project’s game pillars, ensuring that every asset existed in service of the experience rather than as isolated set dressing (see the Level Design breakdown for more context). The art direction focused on creating an immersive, whimsical solarpunk world that supports strong worldbuilding and invites players to fully immerse themselves in the narrative experience. Through deliberate use of color, shape language, and composition, I aimed to evoke feelings of awe, curiosity, and exploration while reinforcing the narrative and spatial goals of the level.

Visually, I set out to blend the bold, inked outline rendering and high-contrast readability of Borderlands with the bright, saturated color language of Hi-Fi Rush, while drawing inspiration from the loose, expressive qualities of Alariko’s concept art. I also integrated design aesthetics of Ian McQue and Hamish Frater in my ship and architectural designs.

Garage Interior

Exterior

Procedural Tools

To handle the scope of art required for this level, I relied on procedural, tool-driven workflows including Blueprint tools, Unreal Engine’s PCG framework, Houdini, and Substance Designer. These tools allowed me to work holistically, developing art and level design in parallel while staying flexible and aligned with the project’s game pillars.

PCG

Natural Scatter

This PCG tool scatters rock pillars, trees, and shrubbery in a natural way.
This tool uses a hierarchical scattering system: it places primary parent points first, then generates secondary and tertiary points from those anchors, creating layered, naturally clustered distributions.
This tool offers control over the type of instanced mesh, transformations and density.
This tool was also designed to work with other PCG tools and uses tags to exclude areas where you are using other PCG systems where you don't want the natural scatter. (farmland and towns in this use case)
Splines dictate where the scatter will happen and can also cut out areas of the scatter.

Farmland

A looped spline determines the area of the farmland, and another non-looped spline determines the path of the crop rows.
Border meshes are spawned to help visually define the bounds of the farmland.
Crop meshes use the non-looped spline as a control path and are spawned along the path of the spline.
This tool allows control over the path of the crop rows and how the border meshes are spawned.

Town

A looped spline determines the area of a town.
This tool spawns building blueprint actors and secondary static meshes
This tool uses the same ideology as the natural scatter and starts with a "town center" building.
This tool also has a function that excludes a given area. (so buildings don't spawn in megastructures in my use case)

Blueprint Tools

Spline Tool

I made a simple spline tool that spawns a mesh down a spline.
I used this tool for the energy pipes, railings, ceiling beams, and hanging wires.

Missed Opportunity

I wish I implemented my PCG tools into more robust blueprint tools, but this idea happened too late in my development process.
Doing this would have made the level editing process more organized. I could have had color coded & nested splines rather than having individual splines with tags scattered throughout the level.

Houdini

Rock Generator

This tool was extremely helpful in the creation of my rock pillar assets.
This tool allowed me to quickly iterate on rock shapes and scales to then implement into my procedural scatter in engine
When experimenting with the tool, I found I could get much cleaner results if I used ZBrush's decimation rather than Houdini's. So, I ended up exporting out of Houdini and decimated in Zbrush and then reimported to UV.

Foliage Generators

I used the Houdini Labs tree tools to create trees, cactus shapes, and crops
I tired to procedurally generate as much foliage as possible to get fast variation on my assets. This helped me fill out my environment in an efficient way.

Environment Lookdev

Using post-process materials to drive readability and stylization, I aimed to fuse Borderlands' bold, inked style with the saturated color language of Hi-Fi Rush, guided by the expressive design sensibilities of Alariko.

A huge thank you to the Unreal Dev community for the amazing documentation and information that is put out on the internet for free. I would not have been able to achieve any of this without YouTube channels like Pitchfork Academy, Visual Tech Art, Unreal, and many more.

Substance Designer

Texture Stylization

Due to the scale of this project, I wanted to work as fast as possible. So I opted to take megascan texture assets and stylize them using designers procedural processes.
I used functions such as Kuwahara Filter and Quantize Color to help simplify and stylize the textures.
I also created custom brush stroke maps in designer to blend into the megascan textures to stylize them even more.

Post Process Materials

Cell Shade

This post process material is modeled after the Youtube channel "Visual Tech Art".
This material offers control over the size of each band and the contrast of the band blend.
This post process also tints the lights and darks separately to add to thy stylized look.

Inked Outlines

This post process material uses Sobel Edge Detection to create the outlines of the scene.
This material generates outlines from the depth pass and the normal pass of the scene texture, and offers control over the intensity of each.
This material also has a line boil function to add to the loose whimsical look. This adds variation to the line weight and also can be animated.
This material also has a distance blend function that makes line weight lighter as you get farther from the player camera. This helped reinforce clarity and also added depth to the environment.

Color Fog

This post process material is another material modeled after the Visual Tech Art Youtube channel.
This material adds a controllable fog with control over the foreground, midground, and background color and intensity.
This tool also has similar functionality to the standard height fog.

Materials

Animated Materials

World Position Offset is used to get optimized movement on assets like the updrafts, water spout, and cloud plane.
I also use the objects world position values to add randomization to assets like the updrafts.

Materials

I used UE's material layer blend system to implement RGB masking on large scale assets such as the megalith buildings and large ships.

References

Retrospective

Deliver at Dusk was a formative learning experience that deepened my understanding of how art exists in service of design. Through this project, I developed both my artistic and technical skill sets, particularly in the use of procedural tools and workflows to support iteration and design.

More importantly, the project helped clarify what I enjoy most about environment art. I am most engaged when art is used as a design device and when visuals actively shape tone, pacing, and player experience. Ultimately, I realized that doing whatever artistic work is necessary to clearly communicate an idea, establish mood, and support the experience is what drives my creative process.