Bronson bradley
3D / 2D Game Artist
REMOTELY HQ
A virtual social platform for remote working teams
This project has been a bit more meaningful than others, as it has been seeking to alleviate some of the struggles working remotely can bring, both individually an as a team. And after four years of working from home, I could relate!
The platform is all in the browser, where the user loads up the page, logs in and enters the Hub world. They can customize their avatar, enter private meeting spaces and play team oriented games with a focus on organic team-building moments. As an artist, the "browser" part presents some tight constraints. But they were constraints I have come to be quite familiar with.
Characters
Potentially the most important point of interaction every single user will spend time with, from an art department point of view, is the character customizer. Restricted by the target platform with how much content we could include, we sought to have enough versatility to stand out from your peers and show some flare.
I created various costumes as well as species of avatar. This involved modelling (Blender) and texturing (Substance Painter). I also rigged and animated them. They are highly restricted by way of the fact that the target platform is web, so the textures I kept relatively basic (simple gradients and sparse detailing) and the poly count is low. Included below are also a few NPC characters.
Environment
Building an artistically appealing environment is relatively challenging with the project's restrictions. There is no such thing as AO, bloom, depth of field, high resolution textures, shadows or real time shadows, physics interactables, no nomral or specular maps, no point lights or additional lights, only one main light and ambient color to light the scene. The poly count is extremely low also.
I had to strike a balance between painting light details in to the textures whilst still behaving well enough under the main light and looking decent when compressed to a low resolution. I stared away from my preferred brush-stroky style as this can look very dirty, very quickly when compressed to this degree, and instead simplified colored areas in to gradients and flat colors with restricted accented details not creating too much clutter.
The following are a few in-game screenshots of various sets and secenes I developed for the world. This includes foliage, trees, tileable ground and wall textures, props and decorations:
