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.