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.