Category: Visual Immersion – Year 2

Buildings Rise!

Following on from the construction of the gate, it was time to create the main building, the massive tower in the middle of the canyon that was meant to be the travel centre. I created it using a really simple process, and it saved me a lot of time overall. I had made executive use of blender’s mirror modifier. This was achieved by me cutting a regular cube up into quarters, then filling the faces, as when you split and object and delete the other quarters, blender still recognises it as a mirrored mesh and allows you to edit it all at once. As you can see there is only one set of real geometry, but 4 rectangles.

Using this process, I was able to create all the individual details of the tower once, but have it replicated 4 times by extensive poly manipulation, here is what the tower looks like!

Alongside this tower, there also was the creation of tunnels and paths that directly link up this travel centre and the main gate at the front of the terrain, whilst also adding some more terrain at the front gate to more accurately represent the levels of structure and height that these buildings have, almost making them intimidating, as they deform into the canyons and rock structures around them.

It was also at this time that I had decided to generate another canyon to try and attach to the current one, as the singular canyon could be seen to the end from camera angles I was looking at, when invisioning my final renders, so I generated a new one, and painstakingly combined them with use of vertice merging and face dissolving. You can also note and see the new mounds/mountain rocks at the front gate from the image above.

I feel I managed to achieve a lot this week, and am very proud of the progress I made towards this project so far, but there is still lots more to come! Till week 6!

Terrains! Part 2

So essentially, the terrain was not going to plan, so I did some research into terrains, and found out that there is a plug-in on blender that makes use of procediural noise textures to generate landscapes based on presets. Different presets make use of different types of noise textures and modifications to generate a landscape, also coming with random-seed feature for variety. This is A.N.T Landscape.

The difference this project made to the scale of my terrains as well as the detail and quality, completely overrun any need for experimentation with my modelling style, and gave me full control of my terraining, considering its a high-poly plane it means that if i wish to change or edit parts of it, I can sculpt it easily or make use of blender’s proportional editing feature to make slight adjustments.

Gate!

As you can see on my new terrain, there is a gate, or massive wall-esk looking thing, in one of my thumbnails you can see I tried to create a slipstream, modernised gate, and this week is the time to start making my assets! Considering the whole problem of a terrain has been sorted out, I can focus solely on the assets that I need to create, in order to make my environment immersive.

Currently that is all the updates on progress that I have for my fourth week of developing my environment! I am very satisfied with the current progress on my project and will continue to keep this pace running! Look forward to week 5 of this journey.

Terraining!

To start off modelling my environment, I need to establish some terrain so that I can correctly proportionalise all my buildings to fit within my environment. I wanted to try and poly-model a terrain to see what different functions in blender I could make use of to build my terrain instead of being restricted in engine or in sculpting. Unfortunately, the work I did do was quite unsatisfactory to myself, and I was not happy with it.

To create this, I had made use of a thumbnail as an empty and I sliced up a plane with the knife tool to replicate the edges of the terrain, from there i made sure the topology was clean and extruded it out to make it 3D. However, doing this completely ignores the fact that there is a lot of dynamic elements to a cliffside, and also that it was incredibly baren. As a result of this, I decided to try and make use of curves, and random transforms to create random rocks that ran alongside the cliffs.

Whilst I think this is a technique I can use in the future, it doesn’t prevale in the case of these cliffs, whilst it does add to make them look better, I can imagine down the line organising these rocks and preparing them for tasks like UV and texturing would be much harder than if I was just to create a height or bump map, but I am happy with how these looked. These are all my developments for Week 3 of Visual Immersion, I see it more as an experimental week, stay tuned for week 4!

Thumbnails!

Now that I have an idea and a ton of reference and images to work with, its time for me to start designing some possible thumbnails for me to work with when it comes to blocking out my environment. In total I have created 5 Thumbnails ranging from panoramas above the canyon and utopia, to up close and perspective views of different features.

For now, none of this looks abandonded, because the way I want to create this and my process specifically, is to create everything in a working state, then start to decimate and break stuff down to a reasonable level, as I find it hard personally to imagine damage and destruction without being able to put a hand on it myself in a model, especially with a large scale project such as this one.

With all the planning complete, it is time for me to start blocking out the basics of my environment, and also look at terraining in unreal, considering that this will be the engine of which we will be rendering out our projects in at the end!

A new year begins!

After quite the uneventful summer, I am now back at university for the year (woo!) and I am incredibly excited to kick things off with this 3D environment project, labelled Visual Immersion. Essentially we have 14 weeks to go from concept to an AAA quality environment, making use of all the processes and pipelines. Our brief, prompt and plan have already been layed out for us! All I need to do is get started and ready to tackle this project head on!

A Plan? Where to start?

Before starting any project, I need to know what I will want to make for the assignment based off of the concept and themes. We had a wide selection of themes for this project, from post-apocolypse to modern day retro. In the end, I decided to go with the option for an abandonded utopia, as the concept of having a utopia fall to nature and natural causes seems appealing to me. Aside with this comes the process of moodboards.

Alongside with my moodboard and project specification, I need to make sure that I also plan out the amount of time that I have for the project to make sure that I stay on track throughout the production process. I also intent to keep this up to date by marking the colours in the weeks appropriately based on my progress, much like an asset list of some sort.

With this I also have a project proposal document, informing my lecturers of all the details regarding my project, such as risks, progress, and inspiration.

But for now! This concludes Week 1! In week two I’ll be looking at thumbnails so I can start to get a general idea of what my project is going to look like.