Alright so i had the urge to build a "visual prototype" which is a description i heard watching a unreal 4 demonstration about Level Design. The basic idea behind it, is to create something as close as possible to a finished look, and maybe even gameplay or UI movement, as an artist. You do this to figure out if a certain look or feel is accomplished, so you or a coder can iterate from there. Basically splitting the effort to get somewhere without having the coder to work on stuff he´d throw away afterwards.

Since I'm not a coder and wouldn't know how to script a menu ingame i decided to create an environment for a mobile/tablet menu in UE4 which was inspired by TRIALS Frontier menu, then animate a few very basic "UI" movements and backgrounds, capture it and add final UI movements to get an idea where it was going.

After setting up the camera and making a high res screenshot from the ingame scene i added the last UI in Photoshop so i could export them onto the actual clip and animate them too. The Layout for the buttons and final visual prototyp looked something like this:

Layout in Photoshop

BTS and textures:

(Note that the goal were dif only textures with pre baked lightning for performance on mobile)

It was fun to actually get away from trying to be as realistic as possible in all aspects. Whether it was modeling, texturing or shading it in the required look but just to be more open to color, shape and ideas in general. I really like the idea of learning proper mobile low performance modeling and comic mood/handpainted texturing while still achieving the high standard you want.

Maybe the next goal for a similar project is a little environment scene with the same comic mood including a character that is animated and interacts with the environment. Maybe a few very basic particle effects for a cutscene. But thats for another time...