Welcome to the course

Welcome to Buried Memories: High Fidelity Game Visuals.

In this course, you’ll develop a high level understanding of the role of three different artistic contributors who helped create the Buried Memories: Serekh Asset Pack and demo:

• Character Artist
• Environment Artist
• Lighting Artist

You’ll also explore what high visual fidelity means across these roles, and the different ways that this can be achieved in Unity using the High Definition Render Pipeline (HDRP).

Throughout the course, you’ll have the opportunity to apply your learning through a series of creative challenges.

This course provides a high level overview of the work of the Artists and illustrates the realization of high fidelity visuals in one project.

The course is aimed at emerging intermediate artists and designers, and assumes that you have experience of:

• Working in Unity Editor
• Developing art assets for game projects

Buried Memories: High Fidelity Game Visuals is also a useful introduction for generalists who want to learn more about the artistic workflow.

This introductory project for the course will introduce you to the fundamentals of high visual fidelity. You’ll learn about the development team for Buried Memories: Serekh, explore the demo, and set your own personal learning goal.

After this, you’ll explore three artistic roles in detail. Each project contains tutorials and challenges that focus on a different artistic role:

• Character Artist
  The tutorials in this project provide an overview of the Character Artist’s workflow, from evaluating character concept art to configuring the final model in Unity Editor.
  
• Environment Artist
  The tutorials in this project provide an overview of the Environment Artist’s workflow, from initial greybox blockout (completed by the Level Designer) to final polish for the game environment.
  
• Lighting Artist
  The tutorials in this project provide an overview of the Lighting Artist's workflow, from identifying sources of light in the concept art to implementing and configuring post-processing effects.

There are two approaches you can take to this course:

• Linear
  Work through each section sequentially to develop an overall understanding of how high fidelity visuals were delivered for the Buried Memories: Serekh project.
  
• Modular
  Focus on the role or specific areas that interest you the most.

Challenges

Most tutorials in this course have an associated challenge tutorial. These challenges assume familiarity with core artistic competencies for each role. For example, Sculpt a new set of character attachments provides supporting materials, but challenges you to apply your existing creative competencies and sculpt a model in the way that works best for you.

There are two different Unity Projects used in this course.

Buried Memories: Serekh Asset Pack

The playable demo Project in the Buried Memories: Serekh Asset Pack is used to demonstrate high fidelity visuals throughout this course. The Unity Project for the pack is large, and can take time to open in Unity Editor. You can still complete this course without completing the suggested activities in the playable demo Project.

Download Buried Memories Volume 2: Serekh.

This Unity Project is compatible with Unity 2018.3.6.

Learning Scene

We’ve also created a Unity Project which includes a learning Scene. This is a more lightweight learning environment, where you can complete challenges which require Unity Editor.

Download the course Learning Scene.

This Unity Project is compatible with Unity 2018.3.6.

In this tutorial, you have:

• Learnt about the scope of Buried Memories: High Fidelity Game Visuals
• Reviewed the structure of the course

Next, you’ll explore what high fidelity visuals means and what its role is in game development.