Progress... Kinda

So yeah, I've not updated this blog in a while it would seem :/ But I thought it's probably time that I did show just what I've been up to recently. Now I warn you this won't be a fantastically interesting post as I've been mostly modelling and texturing assets the past couple of weeks.

But anyway, here's how my levels looking at the moment; bland and lifeless. But this is only a temporary state. I've put all the building parts in the level in quite a hash job manner. None of them are particularly well lined up and a lot of the textures will require moving around as I just shoved in any old one for the time being. Most importantly is the sheer lack of population, however this doesn't bother me as currently I'm purely working on assets and all of them are repeatable so once I've finished I can just take some time purely for set dressing and it'll suddenly bloom into life. So don't worry at the moment.

And here's just some of the assets that I've been working on. Admittedly it's not nearly enough nor as many as I wanted and that's my fault. I had quite an unproductive week and found it hard to focus on work. So in addition to these finished assets I've got about 7 or 8 texture sheets that I've started but not finished so once I get those actually finished there will be a big boom in my assets.

So like I said, I'm just basically getting on with asset production at the minute and I should be finished with it in a week or so and then after that I'll be populating my level so there should be a significant change in a few weeks :)

Full Steam Ahead....

I've finally all the building segments in place now. Yeah it's not finished yet and they'll bit a lot of finessing left to do to get the right blend of materials and making them look right together as well as just tweaking some of the buildings positions just in case there are some gaps. 

My next task is just to finish up on the last couple of tileables and then try and make the street look coherent. But I'm also started on the modular pipe bits and I'll get on some variety of roll up doors on the go. That should start to bring the level together a bit more. Plus I'm probably just whack out a place holder skydome just so I don't have to look at black emptiness.

So this is just some stuff I've been working on for the past like week or so. I've just been doing some initial tests for some steam effects for my level. I'm hoping to have a lot of quite standard effects in my level to demonstrate that I can do the basics well. It'll be a lot of rain and water and then plenty of steam and maybe some sparks and things like that.

I'm not particularly happy with this. It's supposed to be steam from like a burst pipe. I don't think the effect quite carries the same energy and silhouette as would be usually seen. I think the texture I used was too whispy and that I'll be better off using a fast panning texture and stretching it out to give that energy bursting out as well as keep a much tighter look.

Much happier with how this came out but I still think that the texture isn't quite there yet. For the level I'll definitely go back and completely redo these. I'll also play around with getting good renders for flipbooks. That's definitely an area that I need a lot of work with.

As you can see in these renders. These were done in FumeFX and it's something that I really struggle with. It was supposed to have the big billowing effect that you'd get from a pryoclastic cloud or with smoke from a fire but I just can't get it to react properly. I think it diffuses and dissipates too quickly. I don't know, it's definitely something I'll have to keep going with until I can get not only better textures but also good flipbook textures.  

Tileable Fun Times....

So I should really get into the blogging a little more. But it's been a very slow week and I've kept distracting myself with other projects that are taking a lot of my time unfortunately. But that's all stuff to do with smoke research and all that jazz so it's not like it's wasting my time, just eating a lot of it :/ 

So this week I've been getting on with the actual production side of things. Starting with all the wonderful tasks of making tileable textures and repeatable assets. It's boring and tedious I know, but once I've got it done my level should come together fairly quickly. 

And here's some of the tileables. I've still got a fair few to make and these ones still have errors that need tweaking like just some tweaking of values in the speculars and toning down some of the normals.

And here's how they'll all look, hopefully a lot, a lot, better once I've made all the materials in UDK and sorted the tiling offsets. These are actually all the buildings that'll make up my alleyway. I've tried to add a fair bit of variation to make it feel unique but ultimately I'm trying to get across the best idea in the shortest time. I can just use these to repeat them along the alleyway switching out the materials to make them feel different. And of course they'll all have different shop fronts and the like on them as well as hopefully it'll all come together nicely.

One area I am concerned with is the harsh lines between materials. I'm hoping that once I've plastered the scene with assets like piping, wires, vents etc. it won't be so noticeable. It only worries me because where with previous projects I'd just slap decals or using vertex painting to add a lot of variety and blend the transition areas better; I'm reluctant to do with this project. I'm not sure how decals would look when the rain shader is applied to the materials underneath, I imagine that they'll really stand out. And I know that the shader will be fairly expensive anyway without adding vertex shading in. I suppose that's something to think about when the time comes though.

And So It Begins...

It finally begins then, well it technically began like a week ago but I have a tendency to forget a bit about the blog :/ But that'll all change now that it's started fully. So here's what I've been up to this first week.

 
I used some of my initial blockouts and stuff to just create some really quick paintovers just so that I can think about placement and stuff like that. I only really did some quick line work as it was all I really felt I needed to do to get an understanding of where I'll need certain assets to be and how the gradation of levels will work out. 

But as I'm not all that great with the whole concepting thing I prefer to move onto blockouts in max. 

So I carried on from my initial blockouts and quickly decided on width and scale. I had a real trouble getting it to be the width that I was looking for. It ended up being such a small margin between being too thin and compact to being too spacious. I also exaggerated the height; in reality these alleyways only extend to the second storey but I wanted a much more imposing sense of scale so I bumped it way up to like five or six storeys. 

These two were just me playing around with overall composition for my level. I know this is very early on and not something I should really think too much about until like actually putting the level together in engine but I just want to start thinking about a final screenshot. But I've not been thinking too much about it, just trying to bare it in mind more than anything.

Just starting to think a bit about asset placement and how to build the level up a bit. Mostly using primitive shapes to judge variations in scale and depth. Trying to break up the linearity of the level by having different levels extrude into the street so that you start to see less straight lines.

This is what I've spent the last few days working on. Trying to just populate my blockout a little with some more detailed shapes. So far I'm quite happy with how it's all coming together. Obviously there is a lot that I would like to do to it but I think it's better that I think about the details of it as I'm building assets and putting it together. I'm thinking that I would probably like it more if there was more going on on the upper levels, try and make it feel much more cluttered above the player.

I used a lot of repeatable assets whilst building my blockout. And it got me into making up an asset list as I was going of things that I would need and assets I could reuse. At the moment I'm thinking of using almost all repeatable assets, that will obviously be altered in UDK through use of material instance constants to break up a lot of the repetition. I want to do it this way as I think it'll very beneficial to my workflow but also so that I can get the level built quicker and move onto the elements that'll be the focus of my project.

 And here's a quick screenshot of how the blockout looks in UDK once I've added in the signs and stuff. Obviously it's only a quick blockout and slap job lighting but I think that it's got a lot of potential when it's all done and I've actually considered lighting.

My tasks for this weekend and next week are to start making all the tileables and start working on some of the more modular assets like pipes and vents as this should be able to build up quite a strong base fairly quickly.

Initial Layouts

So here are some of my initial blockouts, just trying to get my ideas down. I started thinking about my blockouts from what I'm aiming to see for my final piece. Specifically thinking about the final shot from the start should help me get a better composition and make me think about presenting it better.

Below is the progression from my initial ideas through to where they are now. It's not all that much so far but it's a start. 

  

So this is my first blockout just putting down the basic shapes that I'm thinking about. Just thinking about the larger industrial details and leaving much to the detail on the store fronts until later.

Even at this stage I can see some problems with the composition and general scene. So already I can see that I have to really think about the signs and how much they block the view of the skyline. I also found that I need a stronger focal point closer to the camera as it was feeling drab and bare.

Here is my first revision, as you can see I fixed focal point problem by adding in something close to the camera. Haven't quite figured out what yet, I'm thinking like a small restaurant or something. I've also added a lot more smaller details to give the scene some life.

So again, some more revisions. I think that it needs to be wider, but I'm not sure about this. I'll need to take it into UDK to test scale. I don't want it to be too wide otherwise it'll lose the compact feeling I like. But again I'm having trouble with the skyline. I think it would be good to have the skyline visible as a way to draw the viewers eye in towards the piece but I keep cluttering it up and blocking it.

And here is the layout so far from a more overview. It's still early days and needs a lot of work, but I've got the time to revise it and tune it to a better more realised idea.

Some Artistic Ref

So this post is mainly about the more artistic ref that I've been looking at to sort of gauge colour and lighting. Most of the lighting and atmosphere I have taken from the images on my previous post as I believe them to be truly astounding in themselves. But these are mainly images that I like based on composition and colour. There are obviously a tonne more but they'll probably come up in later posts.

Although this piece is not really the style of environment that I'm looking for. I do like the rain and atmosphere to it. This sort of atmosphere, except the fire, is something that I would be trying to replicate for my fmp. 

I absolutely love this image. Obviously it's not the scene that I'll be aiming for. But I really lovely the colour in this. I will definitely be aiming to replicate this sort of colour scheme and vibrancy through my concepting and planning stages to see if it's at all applicable to my final scene. Plus, the fireworks are so pretty.

I really love the colour and composition to this piece. It is certainly one of the more inspirational pieces for me. I particularly like the colour scheme to this and it's certainly the type of colour scheme I'll ultimately end up with. I also like the composition in the way that draws the eye down the street to a larger structure at the end.

This shares a very similar composition to the previous piece but with an almost opposite type of colour scheme. This scene is far closer to what I'm aiming for, perhaps not as futuristic and more traditional.

Below are some of the original sketches for the film Tekkonkinkreet. I really love the concepts for this film but also the style and locale. The pencil sketches are from the art book that I'm hoping that I'll be able to get if it's not too expensive. But I will probably end up heavily referencing these, especially the last image. It is almost exactly what I had envisioned, though perhaps maybe a little more grimy.

Initial Ideas

So this time of year...again. Having done fmp before, well started it and done the whole planning processes, I know what to expect from it this year and I know how much time I have realistically. Last year I discovered that my idea was far too grandiose for the time limit, even though I hadn't planned it to be too large in scale. So this year I'm aiming for something far more manageable in terms of scale and time.

So with this project I was thinking that I would do a scene based on the back alleys from Japan, specifically Shinjuku in Tokyo. I really love the atmosphere and lighting from these alleyways. My initial idea, well not my initial idea but a more refined version, is to have the scene raining so that I can get that some really nice reflections of lighting.

Below are some of the moodboards I created taking shots from areas that I particularly liked. 

This is the Golden Gai area of Shinjuku. The parts that I liked about this area are mainly the lighting but also some of the architectural elements. This would probably be used as reference more than anything as it's quite dull and grey.

This is Hozenji in Kyoto. I really love this area, I think it has such a nice aesthetic. There are some really lovely architectural elements in this area, especially the traditional elements. It also has some really nice lighting.

This is Kabukicho. It's not necessarily like an alleyway that I was looking for, but I really liked it for the neon signs. I'm looking to have a lot, or at least a fair few, neon signs as I believe that it will allow me to have some really nice lighting and atmosphere in my scene.

Nonbei, this is one of my favourite areas from Shinjuku. I really love the whole aesthetic and the atmosphere in these shots. There's just such nice lighting here, especially in the shots that have the wet flooring and some great reflections. As well as some of the architecture. Overall it was very much the inspiration for this project.

Omoide is another one of the areas that was of a great inspiration to me. Again, the lighting and overall aesthetic is great. But this one if more for the interesting detailing and industrial feel it has. There are some really interesting industrial architectural elements that I would love to have in my scene to add a nice juxtaposition to the traditional elements that I'm also hoping to achieve.  

Pontocho is another area from Kyoto that has a much nicer, more traditional feel to it. I really like this style and I would hope to have a lot of this in my scene to get a nice contrast between the traditional and the modern.

Finally, is Shomben, also known as Piss Alley interestingly enough. This is one area that I liked for the more industrial feel to it. Much more interesting to me to have a nice mix of styles but blending it together into a nice scene.

So I've collected all my ideas, and more some, into a moodboard just illustrating my general thought patterns. So at the centre is a really rough sketch of what I want my final scene, just looking at a sort of composition that I like and that could work. Obviously, subject to change. And then around that are the images that I like for the specific areas. As you can see, I've segmented the composition into three separate elements, all coloured coded of course. There split into; pink, the much more modern and slick, predominantly the neon signs at the top most level. Blue; the slightly less modern more industrial elements at the mid level. And green; the lower level that's more traditional. 

However, with my fmp this scene is far more of a backdrop to what I want the outcome of my fmp. The main outcome that I'm aiming for is the rain effect. The scene is, as I've said, a mere back drop. I want to focus predominantly on the rain effect, from the particle systems to the shaders and full on screen effects. This is what I'm trying to get out of this project.

So yeah, that's my idea.