Saturday 9 February 2013

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.

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