
Why make concepts in Unreal?
Building worlds directly in the game engine is incredibly easy and fun. Thanks to our experience on other TCR titles, we had the chance to learn Unreal and experiment with a Concept Art pipeline to add this piece of software to our workflow. Bloodlines 2 was the perfect game to push our skills in Unreal to the next step. We had a huge asset library available in this game, including props, characters, and materials. The most logical step forward was to use Unreal to create our concepts rather than creating everything from scratch. The fog system and the lighting in Unreal are much closer to reality than other real time engines, especially with the recent update to UE5. So this was the perfect tool to visualise our version of Seattle. We have built these underground scenes in Unreal 5, using a fog volume and lights with volumetric options active. Once the composition is approved we then rendered them and quickly painted over in Photoshop.

The Creative Process
Before working on an environment, we usually receive a brief from Ben Matthews, Associate Art Director, who provides us with a rough idea of the environment he needs, together with some references. After spending some time searching for references we jump on Unreal and start working from a block-out scene done by the Level Design Team where we import our 3D assets and give “life” to their level. As always when designing, we start from the big shapes first and then place some provisional lighting and fog. Traditional concept art generally captures the world from one perspective and you have to start from scratch if you’re painting something from another angle. Choosing a good camera angle early on is important and we usually set up a few cameras so our art director can choose what shot works better for him and then we are good to go with the final touches. Once the first pass gets approved, we then move onto detailing our scene and this is the most fun part. This stage feels like playing a real-life simulator game where you can create little dioramas and add storytelling to the scene. If needed, we create additional assets with Blender and then import them in Unreal Engine. For example, in this bathroom piece we have modelled the toilet and bath using Blender and then imported the assets in Unreal where you can easily assign materials to them.




A Fresh way to make Concepts
If you are in a rush, you can skip the thumbnailing process and do it directly in 3D, also you can show a real-time 3D scene rather than one single image so it’s easier for Directors to have the right feeling of the space. Lastly, you can provide the 3D art team with your scenes so they have a base to work with when building the scenes for the actual game… if they can figure out how to deal with our very messy layers! The below concept shows the police looking for you in an abandoned building. To showcase this, we have built a few rooms and a corridor using our assets in Unreal Engine and then rendered a few shots to follow the story of this policeman looking for you. Since the scene was done in Unreal, the Art Director could easily navigate the space and experience the flow and mood of it.



Bloody Murder
Obviously this game contains a LOT of blood. We were lucky enough that the 3D Art Team provided us with a few blood decals to use directly in Unreal. We placed them in our scenes and lit them in an interesting way to enhance their shiny property, adding a slight hue of red light so the blood colour is not affected by the mood of the scene! These pieces show a vampire haven under attack. We placed a lot of corpses and blood directly in Unreal and then did a paintover to add all the extra details we needed to sell the story and mood.