Womb Levels: The Process of Developing Organic Environments

 As an environment artist I have had the chance to work on multiple types of interior and exterior scenes, but there is one particular kind of environment that I have been encountering throughout my whole life as a video game player, which has not received a lot of attention due to its strange, disturbing nature.

A “womb level” is a certain type of organic environment that stands out because it’s not organic in the usual sense of the word. When you think of organic levels, you imagine nature, foliage, rock formations, dirt, water or any of these elements in an infinite combination. Life shows up everywhere either in flora or fauna. Womb levels also display life, but in a more disturbing way: The levels themselves are alive. These are the sort of scenes you encounter when you are playing inside a giant, living organism.

My goal with this thesis is to research and determine the necessary characteristics that make a proper womb level, and with that information, create a way to generate quick and easy organic textures fit for these particular environments. In order to test these procedurally generated materials, I have created a fully navigable room inside Unreal editor 3, which displays the visual characteristics that compose a womb level, along with a tutorial for fellow artists that guides them through a fast and convenient way to generate their own organic textures.