SCEE Masterclass Project Update

Wow, I'm terrible at keeping this blog updated! When I left you last I had altered my concept sketch to better convey the tone of the piece. Since then the concept has entered production in 3D.

Earlier this week the guys from Sony came down to Bournemouth to check out our work and give us some one-to-one feedback. The environment artist that came down was David Fletcher; an ex Bournemouth graduate who has worked on some of my all time favourite console games including 'Killzone 2' and 'The Getaway'. This is what I had to show him:

From the feedback we received from the interim hand-in, I was told to really think about the background of the alien race that have invaded, and how that affects the look and functionality of their equipment. I decided to change the Oceanarium into a breeding ground for the aliens. The generators would provide the right atmosphere for their spawn to mature properly. The environment would have alien eggs littered around. This required some re-designing and some straight up designing.

First up are concept sketches for the look of the alien eggs:

I also decided to re-design the generator to look more fossil fuel based

I settled on the design to the left. I liked how the tank and pipe shapes read well even in silhouette form. I started to model it in Maya

I had blocked out the Oceanarium in Maya. The geometry was really rough and there were intersecting edges and un-merged verts everywhere but it helped me get a sense of the scale of the room. I used my reference photos to help me position each of the objects.

And with the ceiling in place:

As soon as the environment was completely blocked out I positioned a camera with a focal length of 15mm down in the tunnel, in roughly the same area that I did the sketch from. I compared this to my sketch, and realised that the dimensions of the room were heavily exaggerated in the concept!

With the dimensions of the room finalised, I opened a new scene and imported the blocked out models into it. I combined all of the models into a single mesh, which I then set as a reference layer in Maya. I used this reference to help guide me as I modelled the actual clean geometry.

The final result of this project will depend heavily on the texture work. From my previous experience with texturing I figured that unwrapping objects early on in the modelling process will save a great deal of time and frustration; and so all of the 'neat' models have been unwrapped. Here is a screenshot of a checkerboard material applied to one of the models in the scene.

At the time of the feedback session this is how far I'd gotten with the neat, unwrapped models:

The feedback I got from Dave was overall very positive and really got me thinking about all the little details that I had overlooked. At one point he said that it reminded him of a Killzone environment. My face remained calm but the gamer inside of me was bouncing about with joy! It was great to be able to ask a professional environment artist how they would do a certain model or how they would manage their texture maps. Now that I know that the environment has potential I really want to make it as good as it can be!

I knew that I wasn't as far along with this project as I wanted to be, but I wanted to let David know that I had more plans. I ended up grabbing a quick render of the blocked out environment and making rough notes over it in Photoshop.

As you can see, there's a lot of work that needs doing here - so I'd better get back to work!