For My part of the game trailer, my job was to model and texture a tomb environment in 3Ds Max. When it came to my research for what I was going to be creating I had a couple of images that were in-game screenshots from popular professional games, that most contained some-sort of tomb environment or catacombs. My inspiration came from Skyrim because it is one of my favourite games and so I know alot about what the tombs and models look like in the game, I also chose this game as the models that they have created are to an excellent standard and are very professional. There is one particular tomb in the game which is called "Bleak Falls Barrow" and my inspiration for my tomb environment came from this. In my environment there are several rooms each of which portraying a different image and atmosphere. I started off on my first room which is the main room in my environment, it contains a platform with an abandoned fountain and another platform which is a shrine to Titus Salt. To make this environment it was simply less than 20 objects. The first platform which the fountain is sat on is one box with many polygons added to make all the different shapes. I started off with a box with 1 length, height and width segment and converted it to an editable poly, this mode allows you to make your own vertices by connecting edges. I connected two sides to make four vertices and the beveled this created polygons upwards to make a step platform. For the stairs I did exactly the same on the front side of the box and extruded each polygon separately and moved each step inwards slightly to create the curve on the steps. To make the fountain which sat upon the platform I first made a cylinder with 2 height segments and roughly 20 sides to make it very spherical. I also converted it to an editable poly and extruded the sides of the cylinder to make an extruded step onto the fountain, after that I extruded the top polygon inwards and then beveled that polygon upwards to make the stand. I went into my material editor and chose a raytrace and then changed the diffuse and raytrace materials to my created water texture, but i wanted to give it an abandoned feel so I messed around with the colour untill the reflected water turned dark and murky. In my other rooms in my environment i used the same technique to add my vertices and polygons wherever i pleased, this was a much quicker and easier way to model because I didn't end up with unwanted vertices that weren't needed. Also in my environment were many torches and firepits to light up my environment, to make the firepit I modelled a box and extruded the top polygon inwards, then i textured the polygon with a coal texture and placed a target spotlight inside the box. The torches were created by using particle effects, I created a sphere gizmo and placed a fire effect ontop and messed with the effects untill i was happy with the intensity of the fire.
Well compared to my original intentions, I had some sort of idea I wanted to create. I wanted to make a big open environment with a shrine at the end and on the sides I wanted to have altar stands which would each hold individual valued items that weren't known to man. As i have now finished my environment I would say that it is a different version to my original intention but if I had have also included my created environment with my intentional idea, then I think that my environment would have been much better and made more sense.
I think I managed my time well, as it took most of the time we had to finish our modelling, I didn't rush anything in particular, I took my time in the modelling process as it took me most of the time to finish the modelling I had about a week to texturise everything in my environment, I could have however,managed my time more efficiently by spending more time on my texture's as they weren't perfectly placed on my models, so some of the models quality were reduced because the materials didn't tessellate properly.
What I struggled with while making my environment was some of the effects and also the materializing, as I briefly mentioned above, when I had finished making my texture's in adobe photoshop they looked very good almost to a professional standard, however when I placed them onto my models which had different sized polygons, the materials stretched and changed shape which made my models look worse than they actually were, if I was to have someone from industry place textures onto my models they would look alot better and professional than when I placed mine. The most point of making a model look good is how good the textures are and this was where my environment was flawed.
On the other hand though, what I found easy was the modelling, I really enjoy making a good model in 3D max and this project was a good experience to see how I will fair if i get into university later on this year. As I discovered a simple way of modelling it cuts out all the complications of unneeded vertices, i had much ease modifying the boxes and cylinders into the shapes I desired.
Comparing my environment to a professional environment, there are two ways I would view this, the first is that my modelling is almost to a professional standard and I would be able to see it included in a companies game without the textures, however if I was to compare my environment to a professional version with my textures placed, I would say that my environment belongs in a very basic game as I don't think my textures are amazing but more of an average or beginner standard. As I used Skyrim as my inspiration I will compare my tomb environment to a tomb environment in Skyrim. My tomb environment is good but not professional, I will need much more experience and need to watch more tutorials in-order to get a close standard, My materials have flaws which deminish the creativeness of my environment. I wouldn't say its anywhere near close to the standard of skyrim but instead is closer to one of their older games like Arena or daggerfall.
I received good feedback about my environment even though my materials weren't perfect, the reason why my environment got a good grade was because of the effects I used, the lighting I used I had never used before and decided to experiment with, and they actually worked, I had people telling me that my lighting was good and it redeemed the quality of my environment, but I also got bad feedback (which I expected) because of my materials which I have explained already.
What I could improve on is definitely my textures and how I apply materials to my models, this effects overall how good the model looks because without textures, models look good, but they lack and atmosphere or emotion, also I think I will look at more effects as I succeeded on making a fire effect and it looked pretty decent, there are many effects that I haven't learnt about yet so I will look into these at a later time.
If I was to make my environment again, I would spend a lot more time on my concepts, sketch up a couple of different ideas and possibly try to model and outside environment, as my environment was inside, there were very limited effects I could use, because it wouldn't look right, for example if I was to use fog inside my tomb it wouldn't look right because where would the fog have come from, also I would spend definitely more time on my materials, I would figure out how to make the perfect texture so it tesselllated properly and looked more professional, and possibly research more effects that could be used because my fire effect could have been made better if I had known how to animate the fire to make it look much better. As I had used my imagination to make my environment, I would try to model something from real-life as most people on the other teams modelled a place from Saltaire, I would definitely choose that option.
I have very much enjoyed doing this project as I have improved my modelling skill by using a different technique that I didn't know about last year, i learnt how to raytrace a material to make a reflection, how to edit textures in Adobe Photoshop (although I need more experience on this aspect) and then apply them to a model. I learnt how to create a fire effect that also provided it's own light source and different types of lights that change and edit the mood or atmosphere
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