maintenance cages

the maintenance cages that support the robots in my level are a kind of a focal point so its imperitive that i manage to get them right as well as the robots but time is slipping by so whatever i do needs to be quick efficiently done and look good at the same time so i did a simple unwrap of the robot and a loq poly equivalent of the cage fortunately the cages are a modular piece so i save time just by doing the one and replicating it

also i have a few extra props in my environment such as wires and what i can only describe as some kind of ceiling cage

week 7 alpha

it's week 7 which means I have to give my alpha presentation this means showing progression from blockout stage to alpha stage this would mean that I would have to have basic textures on my environment aswell as progressions steps and what I might add or takeaway.

I think i have one or two more ideas that i would like to include but whether or not i will have the time to make these changes is an issue but time will tell.

here are some screenshots that represent my progression from blockout to alpha

making the floor and center piece

in terms of the floor I wanted to be able to make it look dirty unclean and as for the centre piece its hard to make out what it is or what I can do with it but in my mind i wanted to portray it to make it look like some kind of illegal power salvage this means alot of wiring and circuitrry type objects in the centre piece

the floor I changed to a kind of green rust colour to really make that decadence stand out

walkway

the upper walkways of my level I've separated into 4 pieces; a corner piece first walkway, second and third all of which have an alpha of the grid.

here these grids that i made have been baked onto an alpha plane

as for the walk ways they all have the same design to them the transparency on the highpolys is just the backface culling but this wont show up on the low poly

surrounding lab

the actual surrounding lab itself I plan to make using tile-able textures and possibly break apart using dirt decals i really want to put across the fact that this lab is desolate and broken up so this means in terms of textures going the opposite direction of what is portrayed in the concept, as i've been told in the brief the concept itself is only a bench mark which in my eyes means only looking at it in terms of layout and design which im quite glad about because it gives me total creative freedom of my environment.

so first i make two tiles and a rigid under body of those tiles then i can make a indented  large panel underneath that (repeated once maybe twice and a huge panel coming out of the top to enclose the roof giving that sense of claustrophobia and enclosure.

the window box on the side would be done as a separate object and include an emmisive similar to that of the floor panel underneath it.

first dynamic element

I've found a way I can incorporate my first dynamic element in my environment the idea is to have two server type objects in my environment except the dynamic element is going to be a screen that scrolls data in a slow motion giving the effect that the computer is the link to starting up the robots

obviously this cant be encapsulated in an image but it will be seen in the final showreel the image is just to get an idea of how it would work.

props in my environment

The props in my environment are going to be a bit more dirty and rusty as oppose to what i can make out from the concept because it will blend in more with the art style that I'm going for seeing as everything in the firefly universe is a little bit more worn and torn as oppose to the mgr art style which is more cyber realistic

first textured object

I decided to start off on the slope that elevates to the second floor because straight off the bat i had a good idea about how I was going to make them by simply creating one slope set and duplicating them to make the set and then using a UV manipulation node extend the UV's on the U  coordinate thereby controlling the scale of the texture so that I can manipulate it to what ever degree I want.

blockout in udk

as mentioned before I plan to blockout my enviornment starting by the largest parts possible here i have a screenshot of the blockout in udk with some basic objects for props aswell as a basic lighting effect that im testing out because i saw straight away in the concept that the white lit floor would easily be passed off as an emmissive light

plan

I have listed out a week by week plan for how i'm going to go about making my environment this will include hours of work (how many man hours I will put into the environment divided by each week) it also includes rough stages between weeks as to what kind of work goes into my environment i.e. modelling stage texture stage lighting stage etc. at first all these stages will be done in its most basic form but during the stages designated they will be refined.

here are screenshots of my time plan but bare in mind this does not include time put into other modules or account for weekend time so alot of this will be subject to change.

blockout and startup

My first approach to blocking out is usually start with the largest parts of the environment first and work my way down to the smaller parts it's just generally my work ethic in 3D development. in terms of my environment that would be things like the outer walls and the slope that leads to the second floor and the base floor itself. I've also taken up the technique that my lecturer uses in order to break apart the environment and get an idea  of how im going to go about making certain aspects of my environment

so here i've drawn out over my concept and taken a few texture samples just so that i'm more aware of what it is I want to keep an eye out for so things like the centre piece of the floor which looks like s kind of power outlet, but im keeping an eye on smaller objects such as the two rack like objects to the left by the window.