Week One Update

Been a bit laxed with the documentation side of the rooftop project recently so this might be a bit full on as it's basically what I did in the first week. 

So to start off I did the usual, gathering visual reference of my ideas and create moodboards. My original idea was to have the rooftop completely overgrown with a lot of foliage across it and that everything would be run down and dilapidated. Then the big focal point would be a large tree that had punched through the rooftop and intersect with the water tower.

And here is my initial blockout just using primitives. It's really simple, far too simple to be honest. I really struggle with having both a functional rooftop that could be believable and one that wasn't just boring old vents. On my second blockout I was experimenting with trying to have a more compact environment, one that wouldn't look so sparse and empty.  

After doing these quick blockouts I took some time to research a bit more into trying to find a more interesting layout. After a while I find, what I thought was, an interesting rooftop design that I then adapted into my third blockout. As you can see it has a bit more coherency to it, it feels like a more interesting layout. 

At this point not much of the layout has really changed, but after my previous blockout I brought it into UDK to test the scale of it and found that a lot of my assets I had used in the blockout weren't sized properly. After resizing them I found that they didn't all fit in the right places properly and that the rooftop itself needed resizing as well. This unfortunately leaves a bit of a void at the far end of the rooftop that needs filling. 

It was also at this point that I abandoned my overgrown idea. I found it to be too grandiose with the time that I have for this project. So instead I decided to just go with an ordinary rooftop for now and if I have any time left I can tweak it and alter it to make it more interesting for portfolio shots. What I think is most important now is that I focus on the technical side of things, I want to hone my texturing skills with this project and that's what I'm going to focus on. 

For my final blockout I just filled in that gap at the far end with a raised section to add a bit more height variation, as it was suggested during a critique. But other than that I just fixed some minor scale issues. From this I then took the assets I had been using for the blockouts and used them as a base to build the final in game assets.

These are the final versions of all the assets I produced in the first week, as I didn't think you'd really enjoy seeing production shots as there isn't anything particularly troublesome or interesting to make. As you can see I've built a lot of the assets using a modular method so that with a lot of the assets I'm only building parts so that I can assemble them later to minimize the tri count but also have a lot more assets sharing texture space so that way they have more space on the texture sheets and more detail.

That's all I got done in the first week, it's not all the assets. There are still a couple more to complete and then it's on to the unwrapping and texturing periods.