World Building 3 - SciFi Spaceship Paintover

For this project, I am tasked with researching and designing my own SciFi Ship. I'll have to look at various features clichés in this field and apply them to my own design.

I put together a mood board, with various ship designs and influences in order to help inspire me.

Typical SciFi ships generally share similar features and rules, to make them believable. These include:

• Paneled and armoured hulls – which act as the ship's skin/armour that protects the vital components.
• Cockpits or Bridge's generally tend to have thick glass to view outside the ship, or in some cases in some larger ship's designs they have a windowless Command room that allows them to view outside with radar.
• Weapons are generally barrels that protrude or are inset into the ship, they can fire lasers or bullet like projectiles, depending on the setting.
• A lot of large vessel designs in SciFi have swivelling turrets, such as the Death Star in Stars or the Galactica in Battlestar Galactica.
• A lot of smaller ships seem to have some sort of air-vent, exhaust thing. Even though there is no air in space it's possible that it's their for when they fly into the atmosphere.
• A common SciFi design is to have the craft, be propelled via thrusters, that tend to shoot out some sort of energy light/flare.
• Ships can come with or without wings. Some wings even move up and down, to affect different speeds, aka the X-wing from Star Wars.

I started off with some basic sketches of various ship designs.

I wanted to have a small, one man craft – that can serve as a star fighter of some kind.

I settled on a sleek, simple design, similar to the X-Wing or Viper star ship.

Next stage was to make a basic model in 3ds Max that I could use as a base for my paintover.

I started with a simple cube mesh, then began to alter and extrude it to make the shape of the cockpit and body of the ship.

 I continued to extrude various details, including the cockpit and thrusters and exhausts.

I brought out the wings, and started finalizing details on the mesh.

Once I had placed the guns, I decided to UV unwrap the model - which was fairly tricky to be honest, as the topology was pretty poor.

But once unwrapped I put in some base colours and textures, and rendered the model with some decent lighting to bring out the bump mapped shaders.

 I put together a background in photoshop, I made the planet by taking a texture of an earth I found on Google then making it spherical using Photoshop filters.. The nebula was edited in, so that it blended with the planet.

I brought in my render and started painting in additional textures, lighting and effects.

I am content with the final piece, though I found doing the model slowed me down and I would of rather design and sketched the ship out by hand first, rather than having to do a paint over. My biggest gripe was with the model itself, due to time constraints I had great difficulty with getting the model how I wanted it to look overall and the quality was not something I was particularly happy with. But still as a basic reference it served itself well for a paint over piece.

Game Mechanics 3 - Asset Textures

In this second week of our group project, members of our group started modelling assets for the level. I was tasked with texturing some of them.

Gray Table model by Max Leah.

The gray table was an easy one to texture for, though I feel like the detail in the texture gets washed out in rendered lighting. Hopefully in unity this will not be the case, or if we have more time, we might be able to use shaders to keep the detail in.

White Table model by Max Leah.

The White table was simple to texture, but I was happy with how it came out, the textures were very close to that of the actual reference. Only downside is we will have to remodel the table, as we found there's an extra part that comes down underneath in the middle.

Three Seat Sofa Model by Martin Garnett.

The the sofa was a little trickier to do, mainly because unlike the other models it had details in it's textures like the seams and creases. I had to Redo the UVW map a few times, until I was happy with how the textures and maps were laid out.

Roof Light model by Max Leah.

The roof light was easy enough to texture, the main focus was mainly on the bulb underneath, but even then that will most likely be covered by a lens flare.

World Building 2 - Box Modelling Minotaur

This week we had the task of creating a Minotaur using a box modelling method, which was detailed to us in a tutorial.

I put together WIP screenshots into a slideshow, in order to show my progress.

I did not get around to finishing the task, as it was a challenging one. But I felt the methods I learnt will be very useful to me in the future, when it comes to modelling especially humanoids.

The major problem I had with the tutorial though, was the lack of coherent explanation of what tools did what, as they are they not the same in Silo and 3ds Max. I also had trouble with the symmetry on my model, which produced some bugs when I was moving in it's mouth.

Game Mechanics 2 - Textures

We have been assigned a group project - which is model and map the student bar, and to interact with it as if it were a playable level.

In this first initial week we are merely setting things up. As part of the texture team, I was assigned with the task of creating some tillable textures, until models are made.

In order to check the textures tiled okay, I set up a scene in photoshop with some uv mapped walls, and tweaked the textures I made until they tiled without seams.

I'm pleased with how a few of the textures came out, namely the floor tiles, but I could still use some works on the bricks. I found it challenging to make the textures well, using the photo references, as it was hard to avoid shadows and misplaced colours.

World Building 1 - Aquatic Life Paintover

This week, our task was to research and design our own underwater creature, and produce a paint over as a result.

Some of the main features I discovered about marine life were:

• They have gills on either side of their body, that connect to their lungs which allow them to breathe underwater.
• Most fish have sleek bodies in order to cut through water, with reduced friction.
• Their fins are normally made of spines.
• Most fish tend to have skeletons, despite their flexible body, normally made of cartilage.
• No external ears or eyelids.
• Fertilization takes place externally outside the body.
• Eyes are on either side of head, or some fish don't even have visible ones.
• Some fish like squids and jellyfish are spineless.
• The deeper you go underwater the weirder the fish tend to look.
• Fish that live around coral, can have some type of camouflage.

I also put together a small moodboard, in order to highlight key features as well as do a few sketches of the fish I've researched.

I also did a few sketches to get a few ideas, mainly concentrating on greatly differing designs in order to have variety in main features.

I settled for a combination between sketches 2 and 5. I liked the overall intimidating design of sketch 2, but I wanted to include more curves and the alien design of 5 in it's form.

Next stage, was to start creating a rough model in Mudbox.

Started sculpting the head from a simple sphere prefab, once I was satisfied with the details, I began to stretch out its body, and adding subdivisions for extra details and polys.

Started bringing out the creature's fins, and adding finger details to it's mouth. I also pulled out and sculpting it's back tail and fin, adding additional subdivisions to add more polys and smoothness to the model.

To create the correct pose, I added joints and put the fish into a decent pose. I also used Mudbox to edit the lighting and add additional shadows and detail.

I produced three different renders, with three different compositions and lighting, before deciding which one to use as the final render.

I took the render into photoshop, adding textures and some underwater effects, as well as tweaking the lighting.

I'm quite happy with how this project turned out, although I would of liked a bit more time to work on the paint over, possibly adding more finer details. But I am quite pleased with the sea monster's design, hopefully with more experience in mud box, I'll be able to create something in more detailed and authentic.

Game Mechanics 1 - Jon Luard Building

This week's brief was to make a model replicating a section of the John Luard building.

After taking a variety of reference photos, I began putting together the model in Maya, starting with some simplistic geometry.

Creating the steps was a little tricky, but I mainly just used grid snapping to move the each step beneath the other, in order to keep them all uniformed.

Using the insert edge loop tool along with the extrude tool, I started adding details to the building, such as doorways and windows. I also made seperate simple models for the other geometry.

I used the reference photos I had taken to create the various different textures for the model, I also made normal maps in crazy bump to bring out the details in the bricks and roof. Although I was still getting used to reusing Maya after the summer, I found that using tiled textures was fairly simple, but required a good tweaking in the uv maps. For the small props and models, I unwrapped the uvs myself manually.

Once I was with the textures, and adding various other models, I started working on the lighting for the piece, experimenting with the mental ray options.

I then rendered a variety of angles for results.

Overall I'm happy with the results, I found that the lighting and render settings made a huge difference to the result of the work. I think if I had more time, I would of maybe started working on adding more details, such as the various wires and cables hanging off the building. Also my uv maps are a bit of mess when looking at them, but for the purpose of this project, I felt they worked well, however I would most certainly unwrap them manually in future, even for the tiled textures.