Saturday 26 October 2013

The rooftop project

My latest assignment is to make a rooftop. there's a lot of room for creativity in the brief and the texture nor tri budget isn't too bad neither..  Obviously it has to be a rooftop of some sort. No default UDK assets are allowed to be used ( in any way meaning your own skydome) there's 4 diffuse/normals and specs of 1024 we're allowed to use and 20k tri's.  Yet I decided to start small.

Why you might ask ?

The reason I wanted to start small is to allow myself the time to work on detail and expand in the time that is left rather than scrap idea's or leave area's unfinished.
My first move was to whitebox in UDK, this would allow me to quickly play around with simple
shapes, See what works and what does not. I made a few passes but decided to go for the following
idea.



It's going to be a very small scene on top of a skyscraper somewhere in asia, it contains a rooftop restaurant and a small section of the roof of the building. There a very quick idea for expansion where the player would go around the billboard through the door, jumping down and after a few leaps of faith makes it to the other building where it climbs up and most likely finds..... Not sure what he finds but it will be interesting coming up with something when I get that far. But first priority is the 1 rooftop.



After some good thinking I came up with an idea on how to plan my textures.  I opened up photoshop and turned the grid on, tracing the lines to divide the 1024 blocks into smaller blocks writing down what I expect to use for each asset.



Once all the white boxing was done I decided it was time to do some modelling. Normally I would model each asset then go on to unwrapping and texturing but because I wanted to see the scene as a whole.
 I decided to make a quick/rough model for each asset and then refine it as I'd go to give things more detail while still keeping a good eye on the scene.