Summary:

Underground Manchester was a project that involved the research, discovery and illustration of life in the large underground bomb shelters created for Manchester City during the war. My primary responsibility was to develop an immersive, educational environment, which illustrated the atmosphere of these areas during the war. I decided to create this using the Unreal Development Kit.

Procedure:

I went on-site and took photos of the upper-levels to get a sense of scale for the final product. Using these, alongside a blueprint of the original tunnel network, I created a shell of the underground in Unreal. I used photos taken from inside the tunnels as a reference for textures as well as to get a sense of atmosphere, which I tried to replicate using Unreal’s particle systems and colour grading abilities. I used trigger systems, as well as in-game post processing techniques to switch between the old and the new versions of the underground, showing a dynamic difference between the two worlds as they stand now, to as they were 70 years ago. I combined this with spawned dynamic meshes, which would only appear during the “flashback” triggers, these assets would be relevant to items found in an underground bomb shelter, (such as posters, helmets, etc.), and these items would act as triggers to offer educational information to the player. A radio would start playing music from that time, or a diary would start playing video against the walls, of what life was like in 1940, as some examples.