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.

End of Character Project

This week I rushed through the texturing in the three days remaining and it really shows. The textures are flat and uninteresting; there is very little material definition across the model. I think the only reason the jetpack reads as a jetpack is because PBR creates good metallic materials easily. The quality of the mesh and texturing are vastly different, the complexity of the mesh compared to the complexity of the textures make them both look like they are from two completely different games or even generations.

That said I am really pleased with the mesh, I think for the most part my topology is neat and smooth and would allow for good deformation if it were to be rigged, if I had more time I would’ve liked to have rigged and posed it but as it is it hardly seems worth posing this model as it is so far away from portfolio quality.

It’s not just the rushed textures that let it down but also the poor design, it was set to fail from the start, as the saying goes: “you can’t polish a turd” it was a bad design and no amount of good modelling and texturing would have changed that. I think I spent far too long trying to come up with a good design for the character, and after all that time spent I still had no good designs.

If I was to do this again I guess the only way to come up with better designs is to do more of them, so by that logic I’d have to spend much longer than I did designing, so I’d design for most of the project, hope that one design is good and then create a very low poly model to save time modelling. But even then I might not come up with a good design, so all I can take away from this is that I’m a bad designer and that’s something I need to work on.

I’ve really let myself down with this project; I can and have done far better than this. I feel as if I’m at my lowest point right now, this is the first brief I’ve really failed in. All I can do now is try harder next time.

3rd Week of Character Project

With the base body mesh complete I went ahead and did some paint overs on the mesh to try to create an interesting silhouette.

 

From these designs above I liked the bulkier designs that pushed the silhouette away from the regular body shape. I then took the one I liked the most and added detail.

From here I began modelling the jetpack to sit on the character. I experimented with the shape further in 3ds Max to try to push the design further.

When I had finished the mesh I did some basic value studies and unwrapped it ready for texturing next week.

I was hoping to have begun texturing this week, but I wasn’t’ generating good enough ideas for a design, I mostly settled on this one because I was really running out of time. I just ended up selecting an ok design from a selection of bad designs.