Sunday 25 January 2015

Container City Week 3



A lot of this week involved unwrapping and more modelling, I created the leaver box which the player goes to to turn the power on, I made some additions to the lift design and I made the button pads for the lift.



I spent a day designing and creating the clamp that connected the containers and the rails, another team mate already made a mesh for these but we realised the design didn’t allow for the containers to be hung from the rails at varying angles, there needed to be a ball joint between the rail and the container so we could position them as we wanted, so the job was given to me to make them. Original design:




It was difficult to add a joint that allowed for so much movement but wasn’t too tall so that the player could jump from the top of the container and onto the rail. Here are some of the iterations:



I finished with a design that fitted with the world and allowed for lots of movement. I finished unwrapping everything and began texturing, I also started some projection mapping for the button pad.




Saturday 17 January 2015

Container City Continued



This second week I finalised the mesh for the centre pillar with lights that run up it as well as the lift itself. I also concepted some button pads and some designs for the lift.


I then put together some mood boards, we wanted our level to be somewhere in the mountains of Nepal, and we wanted our level to reflect that as if the people of Nepal fled here after an apocalypse.


 










 
 








I then had to figure out how to make big holes coming out of the big tunnel without making one big mesh for the whole tunnel.




I designed these covers for the holes that fitted with our over the top sci fi theme, so that I didn’t have to make tunnels going out of the main tunnels I made these act like doors, so for our level most of them will be closed so to insinuate that there are more tunnels without making them.




To be able to have these big hole covers sit next to each other I needed to rotate them instead of having them just sit square on, this rotation of them also made them look a lot more interesting.




But these had to sit on a curved surface, so the holes themselves need to be curved, so I needed to create these at multiple rotations to fit the curve of the tunnel.





These also made for good vents that we need for the tunnel. These are all unwrapped and ready to texture


Sunday 11 January 2015

Enter Container City



I was excited to start this brief, working in a team again excited me and I was ready to get back into work after the Christmas break.

On the first day we all sat around  coming up with ideas, we all wanted a broken transport system like a train that had fallen apart due to an apocalypse and people had come and built a city out of the containers. Our target was to get the idea and level layout done straight away so that we could start working on making the level.






Here were some of the ideas I came up with, I was imagining a long tunnel with a freight train carrying containers had crashed, and towards the end the player is forced downwards where the train has fallen off of a cliff to add verticality to the level.




By about midday we had decided on creating a vertical tunnel filled with rails carrying containers, we were imagining something like the door warehouse sequence from Monsters Inc. With that idea down I made a white box of our level and our level layout was done.




I was assigned to large architectural and hard surface parts of the level. This time I wasn’t engine person, I would have liked to but another member of the team wanted to take the engine role this time. With this project the engine person was assigned to do exclusively engine work so we should get a lot of good technical engine components in our level. Not being engine person on this project meant that I could focus on working on my 3D skills as I don’t really want a career in engine work.






Beginning modelling I wanted to start with the cylinder itself, to begin with I thought of modelling these massive concrete tiles and arrange them into a cylinder. Unfortunatly this idea was very tri heavy and as it was it had gaps between the tiles, the only way to fix that would be to increase the tri count of each tile to round it off more. But instead I decided to just create a cylinder and texture the tiles on, this was far less tri intensive and it didn’t really matter that these tiles weren’t modelled because the player wouldn’t be getting that close to them during the game.



I then started designing the centre coulomb in 3ds Max trying to think about how it supports itself and how a lift would work inside it. I decided for the big metal beams supporting the piller to also be rails in which the lift uses to move.



The lift would essentially be a platform that ran vertically along the rails.