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