Level Jam

Way back in the group project we organised a day where we all worked on the level and incorporated changes in engine that we thought were needed. This really helped to get a fresh perspective on the project and make some new stuff. I organised a similar thing at Uni with other 3rd years where we switched around each others levels and worked on everyone's stuff for 40 minutes. It went really well and everyone seemed to take the changes made on board. Below are some suggestions to what people wanted in my level.

Ant wanted some minor props so mocked up some chairs, book stand and plinth. He thought it had a religious feel to it, although I am not to fond of putting chairs where you are supposed to walk in I will be incorporating some smaller props. 

Max added these little sentinel bots which animated around the environment and scanned the crystal, which I always planned to do. I will definitely be adding some sort of animated bot, however as this is a blatant rip off from the bots in Halo I will be changing the design to be a bit more original! 

Matt made these big ships that are docking on the base on the outside. He mentioned the shapes were designed off  bones as he knew I used something similar for the design of the base. The ship in the last shot was animated to fly overhead which looked really impressive, especially if I put some sound in. Again this will be a case of redesigning stuff. 

Rich did me a nice Paint-over which really helped illustrate his ideas for the crystal. I especially like the small crystal fragments that are floating beside the crystal. This is definitely something I will be playing with as well as making the light source the crystal itself. 

Outside Progress

Shots from the outside, just been adding meshes and detailing different focal points. The only sections that needs more work now really is the main base, I am also planning on making a bush to populate sections if I have enough time. 

Interior Shots

Just been unwrapping sections and lighting stuff mainly downstairs. Still got a little to do with unwrapping and fleshing out sections. Need to make some little minor assets such as boxes and things like that. 

Gravitational Centre

To hold the main rock and crystal piece in place I have been making this gravitational piece which sits at the bottom of the interior. I modelled it off some photo Chris gave me of a mining facility. I liked these giant springs underneath, and I animated the flaps in max to open when the player goes near it.

This is the baked version with ambient occlusion and Normals, I have yet to do a texture for it but here is the shot in engine.

Lack of Updates (Centre Piece)

So recently I have been working hard as well as juggling Art Tests and Interviews for potential jobs, because of this I have not really had a time to sit down and write my blog posts. I am now going to fill in what I have been doing over the last few week as a couple of different entries. First of all I want to talk about the interior.

I have been working on the main central piece which is a giant rock formation with a big glowing crystal stuck in the centre. Above is the low poly crystal which I baked using Mike's Autobaker to save me some time. I then combined all the cavity, ambient occlusion, gradient etc. to get the final result. A lot of the material definition will be done in engine with shaders. 

Here is a portion of the rock I sculpted to hold the crystal, the idea is that this will float somewhere in the centre with the crystal on top, there are also smaller rocks which will float next to this as well. Done in a similar way to above (baked on the left) retopologising these takes a long time. 

Here are some shots of the crystal in Engine on top of the rocks. This is using an interior mesh to give a cloudiness inside the crystal itself, this is one of the most complicated materials I have tried to replicate as its so multi layered, still some tweaking to do but happy for now. It was also suggested by Ant that I have an Orrey in the centre with Spinning planets galaxies and stars, I really liked this idea so have started to work on this. 

Easter Break

Took a couple of days off at the weekend to try and recuperate and take a visual break from my work, really getting into the swing of things again now and balancing the Exterior and Interior Base as well as the landscape is giving me lots of good breaks visually to stop my eyes getting bored of looking at the same thing.

Not much has changed to the interior just more unwrapping and adding a nice contrast to the focal point with some long draped flags, I needed to take a visual break from the Interior and focus a bit more on the outside because that was falling behind 

 Here is a shot from the towers in the distance, been working on modelling these this week using a lot of existing interior stuff which has meant they have been made and placed in about a day. I also wanted to try and blend the hard surface stuff into the landscape, having a mixture of rocky landscape and Sci-fi closer up.
The idea is that you will enter the interior through the back and work your way to the outside.

Also made some more meshes and textures for the outside including a pine tree which I got some reference and textures for while I was at home. Also planning on making some small bushes and lower grand vegetation to break up the floor a bit more. 

Edit:

After some Critique of Polycount and Cry-Dev, boosted exterior lighting and brightened shadows :D