Blog 3

 Week 4: There has been slow but stead progress with my modeling for this week. I have been Working on the smaller props. Now that the outer walls had been made I could focus on adding in the smaller items that make up the room. The biggest one that I worked on was the fireplace that features heavily in the "meeting room" scene. It is a main feature of the room and has many other smaller items cluttered ontop of it. I tried to build it in the most efficient way that I could. the biggest issue with making the fire place was the center piece. A circle platform that holds a Victorian floral pattern. This pattern is fairly intricate and would be very poly costly to model. After talking to my tutor about the issue, it was suggested that I use a program called "photosculpt". This is a program that can create geometry, parallax maps and normal maps for me. All I would have to do is take two clear pictures of the emblem on the fire place, or one similar. One photo from the front and another from a 45 degree angle. With the geometry that the program would generate from the two photos, I could place it ontop of a low poly version of the patter that I would make and use the generated high poly version as a high poly bake. This would save allot of polys and give a good effect on the model.



The next piece that I made were a small set of Victorian wall lights. These lights are placed twice on each of the four walls of the room. In the "meeting room" scene, they can be seen in nearly every shot. There are a few variations of the same light; as some are broken without lamp shades and other are working with the lamp shades on. I build a full one with the lamp shades on; as I can take the shades off or break one of the lights to make the variations afterwards. This was a fairly simple build. All that was needed was for me to draw a curve that mimicked the shape of the lights neck and extrude along it. Once this was done it was a case of extruding an edge-loop to make the protraction cup that appears under the light bulb incase the bulb breaks and a simple cylinder for the lamp shade. This was a simple build as it is a small asset that the player cannot get close to.



The next model that I made and am still working on is the two main chairs that the main characters sit on. These are two near identical red leather Victorian chairs. The issue with building this is that I need to make sure that the object looks soft enough so that it looks like a comfortable chair, unlike some ridged plastic thing. I've had some difficulty keeping it smooth and the geometry clean, however at the moment the whole chair body has been made with clean geometry except for the legs. It should be finished by Tuesday easily. After the chair is modelled I will use Z-brush to do the major details such as the rivets in the back cushion and all the scuff marks.

Photosculpt: http://www.photosculpt.net/

Blog 2

Week 3: After looking at the various props that I would have to make I decided to begin modeling the "meeting room" first. I chose this because both rooms are exactly the same in terms of size and wall design; the only major difference between the rooms is that the "meeting room" has a large window on the wall opposing the main entrance doors and the "tech room" doesn't.

I have chosen to follow a modular style of modeling as I want to avoid as much BSP in Unreal as I can. This is because in my experience the Unreal engine crashes allot more if your map is primarily BSP. To start off with I built a base rectangle for a wall segment and modeld the pattern style that are on the walls in the film. I then saw that there were several size variations of this pattern throughout the room. I simply resized the wall segment that I had already made to match. There were a total of 4 wall variations. I then began to piece the various segments together to mimic the pattern design from the film and create the outer walls of the room. There were no real issues with doing this, all the pieces fitted together and worked well. I then made the doors for both the main entrance which was a double door and the connecting door to the "tech room". 

Again I used the snapshots that I had gathered from the film to use as reference for the doors and the door boarders. Like the walls the doors had a simple concentric square pattern. This was fairly easy to replicate, the harder part was creating the boarders. I wasn't sure what would be the best way to go about modeling them. They have groves going down them and I didn't know if it would be poly efficient to modle the grove in or perhaps use a high poly bake instead. For the time being I have modeled them in, if it is seen as a better idea to bake the details in later on then I will do so.

08/10/2010 Blog 1

In the first lesson we were told that we would be doing a scene from a film of our choice. The scene would have to be practical for a gameplay in the format that we would specify. The film I chose to do was The Matrix. The scene that i chose was two room in the film. One being the "meeting room" where Neo first meets Morpheus and the second room would be the "tech room" when Neo first gets awakened from he matrix. These two rooms are both next to eachother connected by a small door in the corner of either room. The reason that i chose these rooms is because although the rooms them selves aren't complected to make; they provide many intricate props that i can make individually and use as portfolio pieces. The Matrix film is well stylalised and the machinery that they use to get Neo out of the matrix are unusual which will make them more appealing to look at. We did a short presentation outlining all the points that i have stated so far along with mood boards and project plans for the key pieces.