Michael Denhart
Game Designer. Lighting Artist. Storyteller.
The Norman Rockwell Museum
Lead Game Designer
For this project I had the honor of leading the design and modelling team to develop and implement mechanics and interactive toolset for curators of Norman Rockwell Museum. Using Unreal Engine 5 and the Lumen lighting system we took a proof-of-concept project and recreated the museum as it stands today.
The core of the project is to allow curators of the Norman Rockwell Museum to place and move artwork within the galleries, adjust wall colors, and modify description plaques. They can then save the data to allow conversion to an HTML friendly format and portal where people around the world can access the galleries they curated.
With a team of three, we were able to create custom blueprints for the interaction and save system while also modeling modular assets for walls and displays within the museum. I was responsible for leading the team, creating the full museum layout, assembling the modular walls and ceilings, creating decals for details, creating the lighting system, and creating a ten slot save system for the project.
Building the Museum
Taking over the project from the proof-of-concept team allowed us to utilize the created code and begin to recreate the Norman Rockwell museum immediately.
Starting with a proof of concept we brain stormed on how to implement the museum floorplan effectively.
Designing the Mechanics
While the core design was completed my team and I still needed to figure out how to save the information created by the curators. This included placing and remembering where every painting, plaque, and display case was placed, scaled, and rotated.
The core challenge was finding a way to save the placement of objects in Unreal Engine to a file that could be converted and used for HTML later.
