The Empire Theater - Thesis project

This project was made during our 8 week thesis project at Yrgo Game artist course. I have always felt inspired by both games and animated movie art pipelines, and wondered how one could explore the combination of realism and stylization in a realtime 3D environment. This led me to ask the following question:
“How can stylized and realistic technical pipelines be combined to create a playable game environment with the style and fidelity of “The Witness” from the series “Love, Death & Robots?"

I had recently watched the incredibly creative episode “The Witness“ from the Netflix series “Love, Death & Robots”, directed by Alberto Mielgo. I found an interest in the art style and wanted to research their methods further. I also wanted to learn more about making realistic game environments, and use a PBR workflow. I challenged myself to learn and deep dive into a bunch of methods and programs, therefore the modular assets are made with Blender. I used Substance Designer and Painter to achieve the realistic materials and Photoshop for the stylized textures. I assembled the entire scene in Unity's HD render pipeline and got help and insights from the team at Far Out Games with lighting. I was quite aware that my ambition was high and I believe in the end I touched upon all the methods and techniques that I wanted to research, even though I did not end up using them all. I am very happy with my result, and I believe the lessons this project taught me will make my next projects even better. This project is still in progress and I hope to update it in the future!
You can read more about my research and process in my blog post!
https://www.artstation.com/blogs/juliasimlund/wBOKL/thesis-project-empire-theatre-how-can-stylised-and-realistic-technical-pipelines-be-combined-to-create-a-high-fidelity-game-environment

Special thanks to:

Far Out Games
Malte Leifsson
Matte Malmlöf
Max Friberg
Students of GA24!