Initial Modelling

Along with developing the engine room I was also assigned to work on the cave interior where the player would collect treasure to sell on to their company between intervals of doing tasks throughout the submarine. Along with this I took my main referencing from the conceptual artwork developed by Tiernan O’Donnell to develop the interior of the cave and with this reference I then began the modelling process.

The construction of the Cave interior was constructed simply out of basic cubes which had their geometry increased to add the spikes, this was easily accomplished by taking some vertices to the top of the cube and lifting them upwards to create spikes with lower geometry I also adjusted the sides of each of the walls to create a more uneven rocky look for the walls. along with the walls I also need to create a set of platforms for the player to reach to collect more treasure. Unlike the concept art, I wanted to incorporate the platforms into the walls instead of keeping them separate and isolated in the middle of the interior as I felt that would look slightly unnatural. adding second platform required me to raise the roof of the cave quite a bit to stop the player from bumping into the ceiling when jumping up to the highest platform and possibly causing frustration to the player. The entire progression from initial concept art to the finished model can be seen below.

  

 

Texturing Process

Like the engine room before it,  ran into some difficulty with the cave interior’s texturing process. getting the base colour down based on the initial concept art was easy and I was able to add some more detail with some lighter shades of blue but the real difficulty came when I needed to do some of the highlighted accents. As seen in Tiernan’s concept art, the cave gets the majority of its natural lighting from luminous green lights emitting from deeper parts of the cavern and the light projects itself onto the spikes of the cave’s walls in fine strokes. For the highlights I was recommended to use an emission layer to create a more luminous glow off the highlights marking this as the first time I used an emission layer within substance and I felt that it created an affect that would work perfectly. But this is where I ran into difficulty. As stated before the highlights were simple fine strokes, this proved to be extremely difficult to do and I attribute the problem to my geometry as some of the spikes caused me to stretch some vertices quite a bit resulting in more thick gradient-based textures that filled entire polygons and sometimes overlapped with completely separate polygons rather than the fine sharp lines used in the concept art. I tried to rectify the issue in various ways from increasing the geometry to unwrapping the UVs of the entire model multiple times all of which resulted in my desired outcome for the cave’s highlights as shown below in my various attempts.

 

 

Further Developments

After trying to resolve the issue with the cave’s highlights with multiple methods with none of them working, I had to come up with another solution. As I thought about another solution I took in something about the concept art’s lighting and felt that the light source should be coming from a physical source rather than an implied source and immediately I came up with an idea of implementing a bright green gem stone that has luminous properties, gem stones were already present within the caves as collectible treasure so it wouldn’t be out of place for some of the gems within the cave to be the key light source. So, I ended up coming up with a new gemstone design that was different to the existing gemstone which could then be added to the far side of the cave’s floor and platforms and act as a light source. My first initial design Gathered a bit of inspiration from some of the luminous crystals found in “Labyrinth Zone” from the first “Sonic the Hedgehog” game. For the first version of the “light gems” I created a simple rock with 5 gems fusing into the top of the stone all in a straight line based on the Gems of Labyrinth Zone. However, upon showing it to my teammates, I got feedback that it looked a bit too symmetrical and looked more like a hand fan which I can see where the feedback came from so I promptly made the changes to make the gems jut out a bit more as well as varying the size, angle and placement on the stone.

 

Final Unreal Implementation

Conclusion

Overall, I felt that the end outcome for this model and its textures were satisfactory and tied in well with the concept art I used to develop the cave interior. Although I am happy with the finished article, I do wish I could have done some aspects of this project I would like to do differently with future works. The most notable change I would make is to how I handle UVs in general, most of my issues with this creative process stemmed from this factor and the use of geometry in this piece did not help at all. In future, I want to be able to structure my UV maps more professionally and allow for easy and clean texturing of props and sets made in 3d modelling and texturing software.

I was tasked with developing some environments as this was an aspect we all felt we needed to have more input and thus we all needed to work together and develop an environment each. I decided I would be responsible for the development of the Engine room.

Initial sketches and models

After gathering some points of reference for the design of the engine room, I then took the layout the Game Design course and marked out where the Engine room may be located and from this point I then sketched out a rough idea of what the engine room’s layout. Initially I was going to incorporate a nuclear reactor into the lower halve of the back section of the sub’s layout but in the end the room I had below was insufficient as not only was it too small but also It was going to be used for another mini game entirely. So in the end it was decided between me and the other group members to not worry about the reactor and just focus on the engine room itself. After all of this preparatory was completed, I then began working on the Models for the engine room.

 

 

Engine Room Modelling Process.

Going off of the initial sketches I developed, I began modelling the engine room by blocking out the basic shape of the the room which turned out to be slightly challenging at the start due to the fact that since it was at the back of the sub, I wanted the engine room to slightly taper at the back wall and get thinner as it  progressed tot he back of the room. since I initially decided to create it using a cube and a tapered cylinder, this resulted in a rather sloppy looking block out but for the time being, I stuck with this as the basic shape for the back wall. I would later resolve this when I was alerted that the design I had come up with for the walls did not match with the modular design my group had come up with for all of the submarines rooms which resulted in me coming up with a more reserved design that removed the cube entirely in favor of 3 walls with one of them being created out of a tapered cylinder and the result were much better and tidier compared to what it looked like before from a design standpoint.

 

 

 

Reworking Models and adding Detail

After reviewing my initial models of the turbine engine, the first thing I did was mess about with the shape of the turbine module’s by having the bases of the  modules be a bit wider and have a thick band around them to make their shape a bit more interesting and on top of this I made the top half off the modules taper slightly at the bottom and the end results of the remodeling of the turbine can be seen below. After I was happy with the look of the turbine, I then began giving the walls more detail like metal plate patterns and rivets and a skirting on both the top and bottom of the walls to match the design of the other rooms within the sub. Once I completed this step I felt that the entire model was finally starting to come together and at this point I added some final details in the form of various pipes along the walls and floor to clutter the inside of the engine room more as one of the most common traits I noticed from looking at real submarine engine rooms is that they are always very crammed and packed full of machinery. Whilst I did want to emulate the cluttered look of a sub engine room, I did of course want to keep the room open enough for our playable character to move inside the room and go to the far end. On this not, Initially I wanted to put the mini game interaction point of the engine room right where the main turbine was located right at the entrance of the room but one of my teammates suggested that the console should be put on the far side to force the player to walk through the engine room which makes more sense as if I had went with my initial idea, all of my work modelling the engine room would have been wasted as the player would have no need to go to the far end of the room otherwise especially if they are doing tasks against the clock. Once I completed this step, I was able to unwrap the UV maps for the entire engine room and its props and then bring them into Substance Painter and begin the texturing process.

 

Engine room Texturing process

By far, this was the most tedious step of the entire process as Due to the way I unwrapped the models and also handled the geometry in some places, alot of the time when applying a mask to a texture and trying to shape it around the models the way I wanted would constantly result in errors meaning it was a constant process of exporting finding an error and then making adjustments to either the geometry or the UV seams. This step overall took at least a week to troubleshoot and get to a point which felt was “Acceptable” but regardless the textures are far from perfect regarding some parts most notably the rivets lining the back was as some textures are mismatched entirely, I was able to slightly resolve the issue in some places by increasing the margin sizes in the UV map but it did not entirely resolve the issue.

 

Further Adjustments.

After finishing the engine room’s modelling and texturing, I took a look at the other models that my teammates had completed and I noticed that my models details did not match up in various places most notably in the placement of bolts and rivets. Upon seeing this, I knew that I would need to make necessary changes to both the models and the textures. Initially I wanted to create the rivet details the same way that my teammates achieved it which was done through using height maps in substance painter. I initially tried to use height maps like my teammates, but quickly found out that this wouldn’t work I found that the height paintings would come out more like gradients rather than sharp shapes like the art style required, I tried to overcome the problem several ways like adding more geometry, joining the parts of the engine room together and even completely rebuilding parts of the engine room. In the end, none of these attempts reap successful results. To compromise I simply modeled the rivets using basic cylinders with the back face removed to conserve geometry and I think that the end result matches up better with the other rooms within the submarine’s interior. The only thing I wish I could add to the room is a set of rivets on the back wall, I tried to do this with the same methodology as with the rest of the engine room, however this did not work due to the abnormal shape of the back wall, at the time I could only think of 2 options which were to add and position each rivet individually like I did with the previous version which resulted in a rather sloppy pattern or using a shrink wrap modifier. I ended up trying the latter but found that I could not find a way to make it work correctly without distorting the rivets or massing up the placement of the pattern. In the end I decided to keep it blank but in the end I think it may work very well like this as then the player’s attention will be directed more towards the actual turbine rather than the wall behind it.

Further Revisions and Unreal Implementation

During our Game playtest sessions, our lecturer gave us a suggestion that despite the detail of the Engine room being done to a really high standard, it may have been too detailed in comparison to the rest of the environment. To compromise, I decided to just remove some of the pipes to reduce the clutter and also the rivets from the turbine as they were slightly unnecessary. In the end the changes did make the level of detail within the engine room match up more with the rest of the sub. This would become the version of the engine room that I would implement into Unreal.

Reflection

Although I’m satisfied with the outcome of the development of the engine room. There are still aspects of this process I would do differently with future projects. By far the largest change I would make to approaching a project like this would be to do some more preparatory work before committing to anything such as establishing what would be the best way to construct the room in a way that will not compromise the geometry in any way and allows for the model to be textured properly reducing the amount of errors presented in the UV maps of the models especially for large rooms.