garden concept

i drew out this concpet of a circular gateway leading into the area with a well behind them, i then built the gateway and wel in 3dsmax.

the well was put through mudboz to see if i could give the models a higher poly look without the actual geometry, however when the normals were extracted they didnt work correctly as the model was too low poly to accept alot of the detail i put in, after looking on some forums aswell it would of been difficult to put them into udk correctly in the timescale i have. i also built a butterfly feeder but after deciding everything in the environemnt would be natural and overgrown the well and feeder didnt make much sense.

the environmet was going to consist of a woman who had given herself over to nature and become engulfed by nature and turned into a living tree, kind of a take on mother nature. the environment would be full of natural overgrown plants as if noone had been there for hundreds of years, the only man made thing would be a tombstone style plaque.

 this is a breif breakdown about how i built the privet walls so they would slot nicely with the stone entrance, i built it in the same scene saved it as a seperate file and deleted the entrance  so i could have it as a seperate asset.

for the outside of the environment i built trees to give the illusion of a forest hiding this away.

trees are harder than they look, after a few trys i ended up using opacitys and intersecting planes to make a simple pine tree.

when i put the opacity maps into udk they didnt work at first, after looking on poly count forums i realised in the advanced settings for the material setup i hadnt changed it from blend_none to blend_mask which allows opacity maps to show through, simple fix for what was a massive headache!

garden concept - animals

i thought of this idea of a garden filled with all eformed animals to give it a whimsical edge above was the thumbnailing to a cat and lizard that never really worked after i decided to build one in 3ds max, it was a massive struggle to do as the creatuure would be static in UDK it was almost like a statue, because of this i scrapped the idea for using animals but i really liked the idea of an enclosed garden people dont really get to see.

concept scrapping

I thought about colour schemes and drew up a colour palette of rich colours that would be at home in a burlesque bar, i started to thinkn about props to populate the area and if they had any narrative impact, i remembered from the tv show friends that pheobe had this artwork which was a woman coming out of a painting and how creepy it looked, i decided to do trampeeze artists coming out of their frames and burlesque women in frames, i wated them to be the main narrative focus of the scene, i wanted it to look like the people had been dragged off and maybe killed by the women in the photo by adding a decrepit unkept feeling to the environment, because i find environments so difficult i decided to build the rooms in udk and draw over renders to see if that made things easier, in truth it made them harder as i had given myself contraints, i did give it a try but environment art really isnt my thing.

after a few attempts and researching further into my idea i realised that it was very very similar to an environment a group of students in another university had created the year before for their 3rd year work, this massively put me off and i decided to go back to a drawing board and brainstorm some other ideas for an environment in which i could build it out of assets rather than concepting an environment, playing to my strengths rather than weaknesses.

Environment concept

at first i thought i wanted to do a burlesque room for this part of the module and began to concpet this room. i am not very good with environment stuff so i  found this module really difficult, instead of designing a room outright i began designing the shape of the room and the assets that would populate it as it worked better in my head than drawing out room concepts which i find really hard and take way too long to do to be efficient.

images i looked at to get a feel for the kind of whimsical burlesque room i wanted to create.

level conception 2

i found a few assets that i wanted to use throughout the level so the player would become familiar with the mechanics that surounded them, these consisted of a preist statue that would give the player helpfull hints and directions, small particle effects which would be portals, wheels that would be boolean portals, idols that are pickups, a running man statue that is acompanied with a prompt about running from pride rather than facing it (part of a boolean puzzle)

i wanted to use a decent ammount of narrative to drive forward this level and i hope it came across in its final outcome in which the player had to collect items to sacrifice to a crucible of fire which primpted a cutsceen at the end in which the preist statues turn on the player, i couldnt however get the level end kismet to work correctly at all so now the cutscene fades out and the player is back in the level (which shouldnt happen)

here are some screenshots of the level with its top down map

level conception

i built a test level in which to see the flow and look of the level, however this level was scrapped and rebuilt because of the environments flow, the mechanics were kept and implemented in the new level but the layout was changed.

it seemed that the first part of the level with the spiral stairs actually diroentated the player, as they spun up them at quite a speed, the player could also cheat and jump from one platform to another as they were too close together, there was no sense of direction for the player with this setup, no reason for the player to go a certain route which in a game style like this can just be frustrating to get confused and lost in.

the second part of the level depicted the player doing some simple platforming and climbing what seemed like way too many stairs to reach the entrance to the fortress at the top, the pillars would ave been a boolean style puzzle but the player wouldnt know to go up to them and start moving them there was no environmental or narrative incentive to do so, my ideads are ther but the structure still needed some work, because we were working with assets from the udk engine i decided to go back to the drawing board and have a look into what assets were available to build the level and puzzles, this was a nice starting point but its still very naive.

Rabbit model - trix

i had no idea what i wanted to do with my low poly model, i ended up doing a few small sketches that i ended up stopping when i lost interest in them.

at first i thought "okay this needs to be a whimsical model" i had already created the fairy model at this point and didnt want to do a model that was whimsical in a femmenine sense so i looked at maybe creating a goblin or creepy looking animal like a distorted cat or fantasy animal, i did however worry that the poly/tri count being as low as it was i wouldnt be able to model everything to a standard i was happy with, i like to be low poly, as low as i can be.

th

These are the sketches spoken about above, i liked the idea of a rabbit, time at this point was not on my side and i model allot quicker than i draw, so i put a box into 3ds max and started modelling untill i came out with something.

this is the model that i came out with, i cloned the torso so i could create a coat for the rabbit.

whimsical by defenition is things that are peculiar/abstract because of this i didnt think a rabbit with a coat on standing on its back legs was whimsical enough. because of that thought i did this to the model......

.....i put its face on a hinge, so the face swings off to reveal a face underneath, little bit creepy, im aware of that, but its peculiar and i quite like the idea, i then had a look at some textures for it and decided it would be like a teddy bear thats a bit battered with a creepy skullish face as the underneath face, dont judge me.

1st attempt at a texture style, i didnt like it

i did a quick sketch in the end to have a look at some designs, this is the faces i settled on

for now this is the finished model but i will revisit it later.