Container project; The final push

This week has been long and stressful but there is no time to waste so I'm keeping it short this week.

Another week has gone and we are almost at hand in and there is still a lot to do; the wipe board has come out and we are quickly churning through the tasks left. I have finished all of the modular assets and I am now working on texturing unique assets and populating the level. We should hopefully be working on a detail pass on Tuesday, I am feeling the pressure due to us not  having a lot of time left, we are all also going to vfx in London on Wednesday which means we are short one day.

Despite the lack of time I have managed to set up my LinkedIn and online portfolio, I even ordered some business cards which I hope will come before vfx. Anyway I will leave you with some screen shots of the level so far and will update you after our presentation on Monday wish us luck!
Cherrio for now.

Contain your excitement: Container City Project

2 weeks have gone and we have made good progress; however we still have a lot to do. Lets start off with getting to the good stuff; pretty pictures. Here is a couple concepts to help get the mood and feel of the spaceship; and for the first time ever I like a photo-bash that I have done!

Bridge concept

Storage room concepts

Airlock concept

Door concepts

Leading up to the presentation we sought advice from some tutors and were told that we should start texturing the walls and floors; so that has been my job for the majority of the week, slowly modelling the final modular pieces and texturing them; this was our next step due to it making the level look more complete and also making it easier to set up the final lighting.

So surprisingly our presentation didn't go too bad! I mean it wasn't the best but it wasn't the case of start your whole project all over again; well that was the case for one tutor but lets pretend we never heard him say that. Basically every tutor we have spoken too has given us backing apart from one; But only one side can win...

We reckon he isn't a fan of the mushrooms because he's not a "Fun gi" (I'm not sorry). Anyway we have decided to try and make our project feel even more containery and have given it a "city" back story so that we might be able to get away with our project so far. The back-story we have given our crashed spaceship is that it was once part of a massive modular space city but during repairs part of the ship disconnected and crashed on an alien swamp planet. Hopefully this will be enough to win him over along with the retro 70's sci-fi.

New moodboard

Through out the week I have also been working on a corrugated metal tileable texture; I have looked into material instancing and managed to create 3 new textures from one parent material. This will help save texture space and makes the textures load faster in UE4. 

Tile1 is the parent material to Tile2, Tile3 and Tile4

In the rest of the time I have had this week I have been messing around with morph targets to try and get a concertina door working in UE4; due to the animation I made before not being supported, I have had to find another way to make it work. Today has been spent sitting at a computer trying to get a door to squish, trust me it has not been easy. At the moment I am trying to get the blueprints to make it play through the morph target but it just isn't having it; so tomorrow will probably be spent doing the same thing but hopefully with some more help from a tutor we can get it working!

Me using morph targets and blueprints

To finish off here is a quick fairly up to date version of our level we will have a lot more assets and textured items soon. Enjoy!

Cherrio for now!

References:

Harry Hill .gif: http://gifsoup.com/view/2880285/harry-hill-tv-burp-fight.html

Cat keyboard .gif: http://wifflegif.com/gifs/78590-i-have-no-idea-what-im-doing-gif

Sci-fi containters

Since Monday we have progressed a lot; not as much as we had hoped but we are back on track. After hitting a brick wall in the middle of the week we now know where we are heading and what we should be working on. We have iterated on our original level design and have blocked it out in UE4 with max meshes so that they can be replaced with updated models. 

Original level design

Whilst I was lost at the beginning of the week I started to concept some walls and assets by modelling them, this was helpful but I realize now that it would have been better to do larger concept pieces to get a sense of atmosphere and to make it easier to model later on.

General style moodboard

Walls moodboard

Walls, floor, ceiling, door and extra assets

 Here is some more concepts that we have done throughout the week;

Door Concepts

Bridge Paint-over

Base container concept

Fungi moodboard

Twisted hallway paint-over concepts

 Earlier today after feeling unproductive me and my flat mate that are in the same group decided to make our own labs in his room by setting up our pc's together; and I must say it is keeping us both on track and helpful for quick crit.

"Home labs"

Soon after I started sketching what the habitation area might look like, by using different eras for a retro influence. I am now blocking them out in max to see how they look.

Retro moodboard

Habitation area sketches

Habitation area block-in

I have also quickly done an animation test to see if our idea of having concertina doors was realistic or not; and it seems like as long as we can get the animation to work in a blueprint in UE4 it should be fine.

To finish here is a quick fly though of our level; 

when I update you again next week I hope to be close to texturing. Wish us luck!

Cheerio for now. 

Sci - Fi as promised

So I'm back in freezing Leicester and our boiler is still broken but that hasn't gotten my spirits down yet, because as promised I am doing Sci - Fi! It feels good to be stepping out of my comfort zone and I am pumped for this term.

Earlier today we got given our new brief; a group project revolving around shipping containers. I know it sounds boring at first but we have to either make a dystopian or sci - Fi playable map with interactive elements. I quickly jumped into a group with new people I haven't worked with before and we have being vibing off each other extremely well. So far we have come up with an idea of a crashed space ship that's starts off clean and pristine but slowly gets more dirty and grown over as you get to an exit leading outside into natural light.

So far we have managed to do a bsp brush block out in UE4 and are in the midst of finalising the overall level. We have also made a pinterest board and our first mood board. Whilst pinning I found a very inspiring sci Fi wall and edited to get a quick rough idea of what sort of colours we wanted to go with; we now know we want to go with a sickly lime green, yellow and mint colour scheme. We have also planned out what we are doing in the next four weeks so that we are on track.

That's everything at the moment, will up date you at the end of the week when we are hopefully on the modelling stage,
Cherrio for now.