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.