FMP 06

FMP 05/02/13

This week marks the official beginning of my Final Major Project, I have produced some test pieces from the beginning of January but now I will be working full time. The things I want to achieve this week are to get a solid model, textured and imported into CRY of my Ship. This will allow me to check the scaling and to remember what the process is for exporting and setting up CRY files.

I will also aim to get my initial environment and time of day settings to a nice standard; this shouldn't be finished as I will edit these as I go, to improve as my project progresses.

Progress – Tuesday

Having already got the majority of my base mesh completed it was the unwrapping and finalizing/remodeling of some areas that have needed to be completed over the last couple of days. I exported my model before I was finished in order to see whether it was working correctly, unfortunately I was having problems with the normal directions as some areas of the deck were a lot darker than other areas. Consulting with people in the labs and Heather we ruled out; normal’s direction, smoothing groups, unwelded vertices. Having ruled these out I decided to re-unwrap the model.

My previous model had been unwrapped according to the symmetry modifier. This fixed the issue almost instantly and it was to do with the normal being pulled down. However this didn't completely fix the model as there were still areas that weren't the colours or lightness as what my material was supposed to be. I fixed this by editing the T.O.D. settings and bringing up global illumination and reducing the HDR settings to stop the camera from lighting and darkening the screen so much.

The next issue I faced with this model was the Multi-sub material wasn't working and it was only applying one material. This problem was fixed by reassigning material in 3DSmax and attaching all the parts of the object when unwrapped and re-exporting. By having tight geometry I managed to get rid of gaps and have a more flexible platform to work off to add other aspects of the ship.

The ship model at the moment has 5 material I.D’s and these materials were created whilst working on my previous (sorry guys not for public domain) Speedo project. They work well but I feel I could make better use of them by creating a better normal map and using displacement.

Unfortunately this week I can’t produce any work at home because my computer is having problems, which is limiting what I can complete and leaving me a bit stuck at what to do in the evening, other than blog and design document work. But this is probably a good thing as this project is 4 months and if I don’t keep on top of it I will struggle to produce a good amount of consistent design work.

What I aim to complete for the rest of the week;

I’m hoping to create some sculpted normal’s for various textures I will be creating, I will also aim to start creating a dockyard so that I have some area for my ship to be situated. 

Started by creating cross sections to model over to get the basic shape, once i understood the ship building plans this was relatively straight forward and i managed to get a basic block out to see if my idea was viable and where i wanted to bring it. The first block out was a single deck war ship and i decided it would be more visually interesting with two back sections without creating a lot more work.

Unwraping the model and creating air tight interior spaces was next on the list as once these were completed the basic shape of the ship would be completed.

I decided to add a hold space that was visually interesting, and was based of some of Empire: Total War's ships, this gave the space some more vertical space and a transition between upper and lower decks.

The finished model without errors in Cry engine, this lighting set up was quite nice as it created a more orange light setup. However i've since lost this set up whilst tweaking the T.O.D. settings

Turquoise boxes are human height for scaling - 170cm.

Above and below are where i am at as of Tuesday evening, the boat is unwrap and the main ship shell has been completed ready for additional meshes to be implementing into it. It will have to be re-exported to allow for doors and other changes. However it is fundamentally complete and does not require a lot of change. The lighting setup is not final, i feel it is too bright and i need to lower the Bloom of the horizon and try to get more atmosphere into the level. This will depend on what weather i want in my level, as i'm not sure if i want it to be typical English overcast or warm morning or even rain.