Project Beta - Milestone 1

For our second term, we began the Project Beta stage of our FMP game Crimson Kingdom. In this first Milestone, we did general feedback and got other students to play and test our game looking for areas of improvement and bugs.  

Over the Christmas break, I slowly modelled the Boeing 787-9 Dreamliner plane which is in our games intro sequence. I started the modelling process by looking for blue prints and plans for the actual plane to get an accurate reference. Above is the setup of the blue print images aligned for modelling.

Another reference I had, which was fantastic to work with, was a model of the actual plane (I believe is a 1:200 scale version). This was a massive help with angles of the aircraft that have not been photographed or for just general sizing overall when creating key parts.

As I started building the model I made sure to keep in mind that this would be a mid to high poly model. The aircraft will be in the intro in fair detail but mostly hidden during the main gameplay on a distant island; which meant we could make a low poly version to help the game run smoother. Here I start making the main fuselage body following the side reference.

I then created the belly of the aircraft separately, using quad draw then evenly spacing out the quads using multiple tools along the way.

Here I made the vertical rear fin of the plane in three main steps using soft select to create the front curved bevel.

Above I show the comparison between the first version of the rear stabilizer and the second improved one to the right. Notice the front has a smoothed front; where the fin is attached to the body to help with aerodynamics.

The second most complicated part of the model (first being the engines - see below) was the wings. I had to start off with an ellipse shape and extrude down to the ends following the references closely.

As the model is going to be animated for the intro, I had to both simplify the wing design, as well as, the parts that would move to help with the animator. Overall, on both wings there are six moving parts, the four ailerons and two flaps. Above is the wing model over three stages with the final at the bottom. As this is where the action is happening, I made sure to leave the right amount of edge loops in; as well as model it for the bending in the wing (the wing actually flex's up and about in real life).

Once the wings were modelled, I moved on to small tweaks here and there as well as alignments, before moving onto the engines. Here I have the step where I rotated a squished elongated cylinder incrementally to produce the rear distinctive wave engine pattern with a boolean difference applied.

Although the results looked perfect from the boolean difference, the only problem was there was a tone of points left from the command. I then had to painstakingly go through and delete and fix all the little errors. The upside from this was I could just mirror the shape after doing one half of it!

When I created the outer shell of the engine, I was not planning on following the surface round the back and the interior. When I came to it later and selected the edge loop to extrude in I found the edges messed up and glitched out everywhere. I tried several methods to fix this but the best option in the end was just to duplicate, inverse the faces and sew the ends to the outer as seen above.

I was very pleased with the process of making the engines, as it had the most detail on the aircraft yet had to be refined and simplified so that it could run in-game. An example of refinement was not modelling parts that you would never see such as interior parts of the engine etc. Above I created the front turbine blades, with help from a colleague on incremental rotation duplication, using the duplicate special tool; saving a lot of time!

One of the complex curved forms on the plane to create was the aircraft's join, from the wing to the engine, called an 'engine pylon'. I referred to several reference images as well as my 1:200 scale model to get a visual awareness of the shape and the flow of it. Above is the steps of making it, as well as the engine exhaust parts which I was very happy with!

To help the game designer with the texturing of the model later on, I named all the correct parts in the hierarchy, as well as colour coordinating each part when it comes to texturing the different material parts and their colours.

After finishing the model, I did a quick render with a white backdrop in Maya. However, the renderer at Uni had not been updated with the mental ray plug-in and so I decided to try out Photoshop's 3D tools. Overall, I am quite pleased with the model and the above render in the software. I also altered the perspective (as well as added a blue sky backdrop) on the render to give the model a greater sense of scale and to preview what one of the games intro shots could look like.

As a part of helping our only game designer, as well as showing my skills and use of software, I have created and textured several models. Above is the only one that I have processed through Maya, ZBrush, xNormals and then Quixel to get a complete finished asset for our FMP. This model is of a famous donut sign from a company in the US. Here I created a low and high poly torus shape; while performing a UV unwrap on the low poly model.

I then inverted a selected edge loop along the middle of the ring and the outer side and split the UV's. This process took only minutes but massively helped with the unwrap process.

Once the unwrap was finished on the low, I exported the high poly into ZBrush and created the high detail and textured surface of the donut sign. The actual donut is huge (about 9.8 meters in diameter and is made of a layering of concrete). To replicate the chunky speckled texture of this, I used a build up square brush, smoothing brush and a light noise effect on the subdivided model.

Here I placed a different colour on the material preset to see how it was coming together.

Once I was finished with the ZBrush model, I exported that and then baked in xNormals to get my normal and occlusion maps. Once these were complete, I headed over to Quixel and dropped all the right parts in (to create in 3DO) for the donut low poly with the high poly texture on!

I enjoyed flipping back and forth within Quixel, a plug-in in Photoshop, creating the textures and the sign's text on the model. I wanted to get the font as close to the actual logo itself but I had no references and couldn't find anything online, so I had to manually match; filtering through the text tools.

After some time, I managed to get everything aligned with the logo and was very happy with it; par several errors in the center of the ring. I had no idea why they were there and it was really annoying me. Luckily after a suggestion from a lecturer, it was just an error on xNormals behalf and I just needed to re-bake the normal map with the ray distance calculator tool which worked!

Here I had an issue with the UV's aligning with the white broken struts' borders. I eventually decided on using the UV's as a template by print screening it in Maya and pasting and aligning it in Photoshop. This then fixed the problem, although it took some time to position correctly!

Finally, here is the finished model rendered in Quixel. I am very pleased with how the design process went for the model as it shows my understanding and development of the four pieces of software overall.