Art - UT4 vs VR

We are wanting to show the environment pack off in a small level but what kind of level wasn't determined. I'm very excited by the current development of Unreal Tournament (UT4) and the progress being made in VR so it was a difficult decision about which to work on for the project. Ultimately we want the environment pack to be usable across a wide range of projects and hopefully it will be after the FMP is finished, for the time being however we need a small environment to really show off what we can do.

First things first I wanted to experiment with creating a UT4 map as an avid arena FPS player I found that creating a level that was playable and fun wasn't too difficult however the problems arose when it came to getting the artistic beauty shots, limiting the player bounds and the scale of everything. I wasn't expecting scale to be a difficult thing for UT4, I was expecting that to be the problem with VR, however something didn't quite feel right with the scale of the whitebox.

The section to the left of the player in these two screenshots is meant to be one story of slum building, and although it feels okay in the 3rd person view in the first person view you feel a bit too tall.

This and some other problems such as the acrobatic nature of the game meant that keeping a player within the bounds of the arena, making the scale feel right and having some visual beauty shots would have taken more time out of the asset production than we wanted to spend. After the environment pack is finished I hope to spend some time using it for a UT4 map. Meanwhile here's a screenshot of the UT map as it stands now.

So small evnironment that can be experienced in VR or not is the way we are going. This will give us more time to really focus on making the assets to the quality that we want. So below are some screenshots of the final whitebox for the display level.