Adam Galles
Environment Artist
BRAMBLE
One of my most ambitious projects was to set out and create a gameplay level that matched the style of an existing game.
One of my favorite titles and examples of well executed gameplay environment art is from the multiplayer first person shooter, Valorant.
I made sure to research as much as I could of RIOT games' pipeline and strategy for tackling a gameplay level that was not only visually interesting, but both playable and optimized.
I fully utilized trims, re-use off textures, baked lighting, and design principles that have been included in breakdowns from artists at Riot Games.
One of the largest roadblocks of this project is that I am an Environment Artist, not a level or gameplay designer. Using what I could find RIOT's development pipeline as a base, I still had to fill in the gaps of what I could not find, as well as try to apply level design and gameplay knowledge to my art.
For this reason, I started with a pre-existing design, the bomb site being modeled after the famous map DE_Dust2 from Counter Strike.
Aside from the bombsite I took on the challenge of creating my own spaces. Trying to create proper site lines and areas of the map that would be interesting for multiplayer interaction.
The Story
A lot of Valorant maps have key contributions to their lore and world, so crafting an environment that helped progress the story of that world was an important step of my process.
I started with the idea of a BIO lab, utilizing primary reference from the gameplay levels of Fracture, Icebox, and Bind.
A tale of a failed radiant experiment and refinement facility, close to the time of the initial developments Kingdom being used to test the effects of the dangerous mineral on organic matter.
Render Passes
Here are some of my primary angles. With these I made sure to include the Basecolor, Detail Lighting, and Lightmap UVs alongside the raw beauty render from Unreal Engine. I wanted to make my environment as gameplay ready as possible, trying to make sure to opt for optimization and learning the baked light pipeline, which helped my final renders embody the style.
Current Kits and Textures
I modeled my kits in Autodesk Maya. The most time consuming part of my process was designing and aligning the textures to my objects. Utilizing trims was extremely rewarding but time consuming for every object, wall, and floor of the environment. I created a majority of my textures and decals in Substance Designer, with a few hand painted addons in Photoshop within my Base color map.
I packed what textures I could unless they involved multiple colors, hand painting the colored decals and murals in Photoshop. I opted for simple shapes, but made sure I didn't go crazy with the amount of textures, relying on reusability, trims clear color that wasn't too high contrast.
Check out my other finished projects!
Like my work?
Check out my other finished projects!
Check out my other finished projects!
Process Images
Here are some of my earlier renders of my work. It took me a long time to dial in lighting, saturation, and overall map vibe. Especially once I moved away from just a Sci-Fi environment and into my more rustic side of the level.
