Professional Brief Practice (Ubisoft Project): Week 1

For the base of my environment I chose the concept by Marcin Rubinkowski. It was originally made for a Love, Death and Robot episode but some of the concepts had been rejected and unused. I decided to use these as a 'base' to the layout of my environment as his concepts are very in depth, from the materials to use to including orthographics with their concept. I'm not expecting the final outcome of my project to look too closely to this.

I have never built an environment out of modular assets before, so that, trim sheets, texel density and story telling will be a heavy focus in this project (I hope that's not too much). Today I blocked out the key elements and structure which will be the core to the environment. I'm planning by the end of the week to have most of the assets blocked out and modelled a bit more and then moving onto texturing. 

I have to say I think a jukebox has to be the hardest thing I have ever modelled. I had a go at making the main shape and modelling in parts but it was such a struggle I decided to step back and think of the best way to model this asset. I decided the most fiddly parts to model were the rounded light-up glass around the jukebox.

I then started again and used two cylinders this time which I bent and went from there building outwards. Even though it is unfinished, I need to move on to getting other parts of the environment done before I become too carried away. I know I am going to bake this highly detailed asset and will do this during my texturing phase.

I modelled some of the assets in a bit more detail and tweaked the lighting.

For smaller assets I have blocked out some very basic shapes including condiments and cups. For cups I wanted to stack them and made two separate asset where I had a stack of cups and a single cup to place around.

I wanted to make sure I was doing the right thing when it came down to texel density. In Photoshop I put together a rough tileable design I wanted to use on the floor and ceiling.

1024

512

For the texel density to be 1024 m² I worked out the floor tile to be a 512 texture and the ceiling a 1024.

Photos tiles

Since I had worked out what to do for these tileable textures I decided, to give myself a break from modelling, and I went ahead and made the two textures. 

Creating the tile pattern itself was the hardest part of creating this texture. I mainly used shapes and subtracted and transformed them together until I got the result below.

I then added the grout in between, roughness variation and a discolouration to the porcelain tiles.

This texture will need refining later down the line but I'll have to move on for now.

The ceiling tiles are unfinished as well but they give a rough idea of what they could look like. I love the tacky but very retro look it's giving so far for that 50's diner feel.

After working out the texel density the ceiling looked rather good close-up. Although as this is a third person game, I looked at the ceiling from the players view trying to get at an awkward angle (very awkward) that would allow the player to get as close as possible to view the ceiling. As this was so far away I decided to test it with a smaller texture and as you can see below the difference is extremely subtle. 

1024

To save on texture space I decided to then make the ceiling a 512 texture. I wouldn't usually do this but as the ceiling is so far away it is a waste of texture space that I could use on other assets.

512

I took some time to plan and figure out the modular side of the whole environment. Sketching ways to put it together to make it work well. This made me reconsider the ceiling, and in the end changing it after looking at old buses from the 50's for the style of striped PVC panels. They're typically a lot larger and tend to only have a single strip of colour.

Everything in the environment is now modular and snaps together other than the occasional hero asset.

I also tweaked the lighting slightly as I wanted it to look like an early evening, as if the diner had just closed for the day without tidying up. I will most likely mess around with the lighting later on but I wanted to get those purpley hues in to see how it worked with the assets and textures.