FMP Week 4

   This weeks been more modelling and dressing up the place a bit. With just a few small assets, lamp posts, bins, electrical boxes, pipes and sheet walkways. The environment is looking so much more populated as a whole, but I'm still yet to dress up the market and make that look populated and busy. The plan is to have a heavy contrast between the market and ship area. Giving each section its own element and style.

   Along with the good, I've had a few problems this week, with baking in particular. As far as baking goes, I've never properly used max, aside from the occasional projection mapping. I've always found X Normals an easier workflow. Primarily because you can bake AO's a lot easier. The only problem is, you have to split up your mesh into separate objects and bake them individually to ensure they don't overlap on the bake. Which hasn't been too much of an effort, especially when you only have a few things to bake and dress your scene. This project however, is a pretty hefty one and requires a lot of fiddly assets with separate parts. Max allows you to keep your mesh in one piece and just assign different material ID's to it relative sections keeping your bake from overlapping. Hence why I figured it was time to give max a better go. The only problem is I kept running into missing sections of the bakes, and occasionally some overlapping sections. I don't think its the process, I just need to reacquaint myself with it. Overall so far its saved me time even with these little hiccups.

Kotaku are always posting random articles about current games, fan art, and other game related new. Some interesting and useful, some not so much, but one I saw recently make me think about the subject matter of my decals for this project. It was an article on Graffiti in the upcoming AAA title the Division. According to Kotaku, "the graffiti is solid". They complained about what they consider bad graffiti in games "bad graffiti is the stuff that seems explicitly informed by the plot of the game". Which makes sense you don't tend to get a lot of political views stamped across random wall of your local town, or complaints about how you have to conserve water in a drought. It tends to be generic chavy names, scribbles of paint in varying colours, with the occasional good painting of some kind of subject matter, that doesn't really show anything but a nice picture. That's what the Division did, and that's what I want show in my environment. Something more relatable and grounded to the player.

Division graffiti.

   Talking to Mike P about the barren section of unclaimed land within the two walls, and how I want to fill that with deterants, mines anti tank crosses, other objects that suggest its a death trap of an area. I plan to show a clear distinction between the populated town and barren wasteland of a strip.

 Mike K also gave me some great feedback about the composition and layout of how the ship is set. Initially the player will get a peek preview of the ship through a mesh fence. But what I didn't think to much about was how its position and angle effects how the player thinks about it. Showing the cockpit and front end first, draws more interest than the back. And having the back of the ship open as the second view is shown, draws the player inside the ship for exploration on Emily's part. We also talked about dressing the market and how I want a busy contrast. He suggested looking at places such as Vietnam, in regards to their makeshift solutions to things, primarily the wiring.

Initial view.

Second sudden view.

Vietnam wiring.