Pre FMP start-up idea generation.

Initially I had the plan of working on my own to produce quite a large scene containing converted shipping containers. Basically I wanted to revisit the container city project, the idea has been resonating with me for some time now. Although it would cover a fairly large area on multiple levels, the layout would be reasonably sparce in terms of architecture, so wouldn't be too much of a task to complete even due to the scale.

Original FMP idea.

   That idea was pushed to one side when I decided to work in a team, with Jake, Emily and Sharn to create a multilayer map. I was intrigued and very enthusiastic to create such a project. From someone who plays a lot of multi-player games at a variety of sized maps, this was a feat and project I'd previously overlooks. Not only from a 3d artists perspective but I'm also very interested in designing layouts. Working out routes and timings for central conflict etc. I don't know too much aside from what I've picked up in my years playing such games, but I thought this would be a great project to do non the less, and something else to put in my portfolio. unfortunately the tutors didn't deem this a worthy project to do, without actual playable game play. So we had to scrap it and come up with something else. Game play might not too hard to accomplish with a bit of research and time, but its something that no member of the team wanted to do, after all we've been studying game art over the three years at uni, not game design.

   The second group idea we had took a bit more thought and consideration. We thought about what we each wanted from the project and what would look good to future employers. Sharn and I wanted environmental work both interior and exterior. Emily mainly wanted to work on vehicles but also some slight environmental work, and Jake wants to be a character artist, so naturally he wanted to do characters. Working out a way to incorporate these wasn't necessarily hard, but we also wanted to mix up the FMP and do something a bit different. The idea we came up with was a series of dioramas, which we came up with after seeing snapshots of time during action cut scenes. This seemed like a good idea at the time, to show off our environments and character designs. This would also give us a chance to create many environmental locations to vary our portfolio. The dioramas didn't go ahead either, primarily because we realised a larger playable playable environment would be more beneficial as a portfolio piece. Showing we have the knowledge of collisions, lighting and other playability knowledge.

Diorama idea reference.

   Before we finally decided on doing a larger environment we needed to work out a way to divide the environment into sections so we all had a section to work on. This wasn't necessary, but we felt this would be more beneficial to show a future employer than a series of assets. Emily decided for her it would be better to create a ship and its interior for one of our sections, leaving me and Sharn to do the environment. The way we decided to split our environments was segregation. A town split by a huge wall from a neutral segregation. One side evolved while the opposing side remained stable but the environment became old and decrepit.

Very early stage development.

   The quality we are striving for on this project, along with all the previous ideas, is going to be AAA standard. To do this we needed to research texture sizes, tri counts etc. So I got in contact with Elliott Parcel, from last years graduates. Along with Mike Pickton, part time lecturer of the uni. Both of which are currently working on the due to be released AAA title, The Division.They told me that The Division doesn't have a tri count set, but they aim for no more than one tri per pixel. As for the texture budget I was told to aim for a textal density of 512x512 per square metre for third person, but as we're wanting our project to be first person, it should be about 1024x1024 per square metre.
   We also had a brief talk about the colour pallet we wanted our environments characters and vehicles to harbour. We came to the conclusion that the best route to go down would be realistic colours but with a high population of assets that pop and give a vibrant feel to the environment. We chose a few key images of the vibrancy and type of colours we want to achieve.

Popping colour examples.