BA3a - Introduction & Task 1 - Week 1

BA3a -  Introduction & Task 1 - Week 1

We are finally back at University and our 3rd and final year has begun. The year starts strong by giving us 3 different projects right out of the gate.

Creative Practice

First of all we have the big one, the project that we will be working on throughout the whole year. For this project we pretty much can do what ever we want as long as it fits to what we want to become in the industry, and since my goal is to become and Environment Artist I will be focusing on creating an Environment.

Research Report

The research report will be a 5000 word long essay about a subject of our choice. We can decide to write it in 5 different styles which are the following: Extended Essay, Industry report, Technical report, Reflective report and Editorial.

Pitch Presentation

We got asked to create a 2 slide presentation covering what we want to create for our Creative Practice project and also the theme of our research report (Dissertation). 

The guide lines for this presentation is the following:

1 - Creative Practice

• Images, Text, Initial Designs
• Schedule
• Plausibility
• R&D Strategy

2 - Research Report

• Subject, Topic, Area of interests
• Initial Research
• Style, according to research report guidelines

This pitch will be presented on the 6/7th of October.

Task 1

Throughout this year we will also get a lot of smaller tasks, where we will be given 1-3 weeks to complete depending on the size. The point of these are to give us more work to put on our portfolio. 

The first task that we received is the following:

Hotel Hallway

By their very nature, hotels are designed to teem with life but when business dips and owners can no longer afford to keep the doors open, the building’s inviting atmosphere dissipates. Lobbies once choked with people become yawning and shadowy. Wandering down hallways with darkened rooms flanking either side becomes an exercise in courage. In these places, the mind plays tricks, inventing footfalls, laughter, and snippets of music from a bygone age — or perhaps some guests really do never leave.

And since my specialication is asset production what I have to create are the following:

Create a clean and dirty version of a wall and flooring. The

maximum texture resolution will be 2048x2048 and the final

material will need to be displayed in UE4 using vertex colours. 

My initial idea that came to mind was to create a hotel set in a Victorian time period and add some sort of growth on the walls but then another idea came to mind that really got stuck with me. What if in case of making an old hotel I'd go with a sci-fi route? And instead of the wall texture just being a plain wall it would actually be the "Hotel room" where a bed is in the wall sort of how morgues work. 

The story of this would be that it's a space station that's been made into a hotel, where the guests are actually getting frozen down into "Cryo Freeze" state. This is to make time go faster while they are waiting for other space ships to arrive to the station. The horror aspect is that something happened on the space station which forced the crew to abandon it, with the guests still inside their beds. This resulted in that the guests after some time woke up because without any crew to take care of them their life support would fail, and they would end up finding themselves stuck inside the tiny space until their death.

When i had my idea sorted out it was time to create a mood board that will show the sort of sci-fi setting i want to create. I really love the clean sci-fi style of the film "Oblivion" so I will grab some inspiration from there as well since it's supposed to be a hotel so I want the style to be a bit more clean.

Mood board

Concept Art from the film "Oblivion"

Up next is to start modelling. So for this I will use a mix of modelling and using a software called nDo 2 which is a software that allows me to add additional detail to the normal map by just using alpha maps. I will use the combination of these two things because it will speed up the process quiet a bit since it's a lot easier to add minor details in nDo 2 rather than actually modelling them in maya.

The modelling itself was a very easy process since it's all just going to be a baked texture in the end, which means I don't have to care much about topology and efficient use of polygons as long as the bake comes out clean. Here is the final model in Maya, and as I said earlier. More detail will be added in next stage using nDo2.

Wall and Floor model

When the model was done i quickly baked it using xNormal. The bake was an super easy process since I just had to bake it to a flat surface to make it into a texture. Here is a picture showing what i mean.

And the bake result in Marmoset Toolbag 2. Both displayed on a flat surface.

With the bake finished I brought the normal map into nDo2 and added some more detail to it using my own alpha maps created using Photoshop, here is a before and after comparision.

Rendered in Marmoset 2

Next week I will be texturing it using a combination of Substance Painter and Photoshop and I will also have to create an UI for the displays the wall will be having.