Presentation - self evaluation

Hey there again guys, time for another blog post, this one however will be short and sweet and judging by the title you can easily guess what its about. Well I had my solo dissertation progress presentation not 3 days ago and I thought it went pretty well, It was quite nerve racking leading up to it. I feel that i presented well, better than my average performance when it comes down to pitches and presentations. I feel that i was nervous as i had a lot of content to share with them, over the Christmas holiday i had worked hard on my design aspects and thus had a fair few slides with my digital drawings. All in all i feel it was a successful presentation, one of the lecturers did have a question about why i split the modular assets where i did. And i explained to him that the bet design wouldn't actually work the way he was suggesting. From this i plan to maybe look at the way Dave was wondering about splitting it up.

Current progress leading up to January 20th presentation

I've been working hard on trying to get some assets modelled that I can show on Monday, and I'm making huge progress. I've begun progress on a large building structure that has 3 sections. A end piece with struts, a middle piece with struts and an end piece to finalise the building. In each of the screen shots the small pink square is the size proportion to the player. All of which are simply the structure and does not include the walls as of yet. But hopefully will do soon.





Large building middle section with strut 3,087 polys





Large building end section with strut - 3,087 polys

Large Building End cap piece without struts - 2,859 polys

These are the 3 pieces I've constructed that fit together to create the one building. I plan on giving the player a variety of walls you use to kit out the building. They would include: a door way, a window, a window with blind or just a plain wall.

 

Here is a small screen shot of them together within UDK.

 

Comparison of old mock model to new pieced together model

Pieces individually

It also shows the comparison and changes made since the mock model, the roof has been raise to get a steeper as now I have put in more research I have found that the buildings had steeper roof structures.

 

I have also constructed another asset list to aid myself in creating the small villages, this can be seen below.

 

 

 

 

The beginning of modelling

I know this is a few weeks late, but the start of modelling has begun. I underestimated the complexity of the designs and research into creating these models, I did not want to rush into the modelling too soon without the comfort of research and clarity. To begin, I need to set up my 3dsmax units so that the units and scaling between both UDK and 3Dsmax are on par with each other. I began by exporting my model as an ASE and quickly found problems. Errors began to pop up notifying me about materials and mapping co ordinates, upon searching online I was quickly able to find the solution and found that it was a simple export selection option whilst exporting the model. I found out quickly that the model I created was about 150 times larger than I actually needed it to be. This was because during the mock up, I did not take scale or units into account, I simply just began to model as quickly as possible.

Unit and set up references

 The units here are taken off a guide video to sync up the units for 3Dsmax and UDK. It also shows you how to make a small cube which is exactly player height in UDK. This came in very useful as I was able to work out that my mock up structure was in fact over 80 times too large. As a rough guess I scaled down the whole model so that it was the approximate size and tested it again in UDK. After some adjustments in 3dsamx, this was the scaling and size of the building from a players perspective.

Mock structure from players point of view

 I also had a brainwave whilst working out the size of the individual netting, in UDK they use a snap to grid option, which I plan to utilise when it comes to building the buildings together, these settings can be changed, however its default is set to 16 and thus if I was to make each segment a factor of 16 squared, then the pieces should go together smoothly (hopefully).

I made a list of all the power I can use to adjust the models. Here are the numbers I will use for reference when modelling (16, 32, 48, 64, 80, 96, 112, 128, 144, 160, 176, 192, 208, 224, 240, 256.)

Testing character scale within the mock structure

Here I tested the units, by creating a 256x256 x512 box and exporting it, I placed it over the default box in UDK and from the overlapping, I can tell that it's perfect size, it's time to being modelling.

Overlapping of perfectly aligned pixels

Organisation of Netting and the roof structure

Going from the advice given to me to use a net in order to create my modular pieces, I have been taking the mock up Dougong structure I did and tested to see how well it would fit into a square net. Below is a small square net placed over a topdown view of the structure. As you can see that the structure itself is relatively symmetrical and so changing its organisation somewhat would then create an easier modulated kit. This would require a small amount of adjustments but would be a worthwhile investment of my time in the long run.

The roof structure is one of the most difficult pieces to construct. I haven't found many diagrams or pictures as to how they made the corner parts of their roofs so I plan on designing a specific modular part that will act as a corner piece so that a level designer can create a variety of houses with a corner joint. This piece may be one of the most polygon heavy pieces as it has a lot of geometry that I don't think I could construct any other way. The corner piece could be broken down further but then would not feel as modular as the other pieces. This would be because it would require the player to make a corner piece from 4 different pieces instead of one. This would also take away the usefulness and speed that a modular kit would give to the level designer.

To begin with roof I put the design of the main building together how they would be when a corner is formed, from here I then chose the way in which I desired the roof to collide. From this design below you can see the method in which I want the roof to attach to each other.

This piece of roof connection is know as a 'Gable' roof structure.

Two pieces where a corner need to connect



This is general design of how I want the corner piece to look

This is how the corner piece will look when it's completed and fitted within the other pieces.

This below is a brief illustration of how the roof will sit on the structure. The plan is to have a small amount of dougong visible from the top as from the inspection of other houses, this tends to be the case with dougong based structures. That they show off the structure and colours of wood from the outside

Organisation, and the planning before construction of assets

Before I begin to construct the assets I need to create or at least give myself a better understanding on how they will fit together. My lecturer advised me and showed me a model castle that he designed and made for an old War hammer game. He showed me how each piece revolved around fitting into one square segment so that wherever he put it, it would be aligned with the other objects in the scene. With this in mind I plan on trying to keep each piece of the model as close as I can to one segment.

Interiors were also mentioned which I asked about whether I should consider giving them a shot after making the structure work. From this I was given the advice of only creating the exterior/structure of the buildings as filling the interiors with assets would be a waste of time as they were assets not being assessed as part of the modular and the time spent constructing them could be used to construct better buildings.

So to begin I took at a look at my first attempt at a Chinese building 3D model and tried to figure out how I could break it down in order to construct basically a tileable and modular building. Here is a top and side view of the current mock up building structure I made.

And here is my plan with the wooden structure to make it easily modular along the X-axis. By cutting the structure into one section, the designer or myself have more control over how large they want to make the building. Instead of making a building that has to be a power of 2 sections or 4 sections, the level designer can now make small adjustments where necessary.

This design isn't flawless yet at the design is not perfectly ready for duplications and will need some adjustments before the final edition. For example, the building still needs two more columns in the centre in order so that 'rooms' could be built with and to give the design more stability. This will also aid in  the designs for a roof that hangs out over the canopy slightly.

More model preparation will be coming soon, I know it's late but these designs need to be perfect to execute such a complicated modular build with precision.

Design drawings and Scaling

Christmas and holiday season is over, it's time to get back into the swing of things. I've been trying my hardest to complete these drawings and designs within the constraints of the timeline, however I didn't find it personally feasible as they were tricky to make and design. I feel I may of over scoped the designs of each building however, they are now complete and I now have a general idea about proportion and scales of the buildings. Although drawing all these buildings has been rather tiresome, it has also giving me inspiration to now make them in 3D form. These are the buildings as a collective and will be used whilst 3D modelling to guide me.



Building 1
 

Building 2
 

Building 3
 

Building 4
 

Building 5
 

From these I will now start the final asset list and then begin 3D modelling. I know that these are late, but I've been working on these over the last few weeks. These drawing are also not final and can or possibly will be changed.