Week 2: The Game Art energy has returned!... But has it come alone??

I started the week in a good mood… but did it last??

From the last post most of you guys and gals realised that I had in fact started modelling some buildings and placing them in scene.

This was a process that continued into this week and was the main focus of the week itself.

The basis of my models derived from my mood boards on Balat in Turkey and the way the buildings were close and compact yet structured and formal. The buildings had a comical and semi-realistic style due to them being on a hill side. However when I modelled them as simple shapes I realised how dull they looked.

The building looks dull without colour therefore having a boring silhouette and structure. For this scene to work and look thought-provoking I decided to go back to my mood boards, more so the original mood boards with the Disney style tapered buildings.

The buildings in those scenes had life to them and felt tangible, this was due to the curved and almost leaning towards you style giving them life and somewhat emotion.

I moved further with this theory by looking at buildings, scenes and architects that use a similar looming and creative design. I was informed by one of my amazing lectures about Antoni Gaudi who was a Spanish architect who had a free flowing style influenced by nature and was a founder of Catalan modernism.

His work reflects nature with the free-flowing curves instead of impending pillars, almost juxtaposing brutalist architecture. Some of his most well-known buildings such as Sagrada Familia, which a large roman church in Barcelona has an almost human feel by looking like bones.

His fluid buildings have made me wonder what my modular buildings would look like if they were more fluid and cartoonish.

Furthermore I decided to look at films like Harry Potter more specifically areas such as Diagon Alley.

The architecture here is fantastical and curved. The curved bank of Gringotts was an exceptional inspiration and to me seemed like a focal piece, something I wanted to emulate with my scene.

From this new found knowledge I decided to make my modular buildings seem leaner, tapered and looming over the character. For this, I unwraped the buildings and grouped them in rows of three’s, and/or four, and used the taper modifier as well as bend. I then later decided to use the squeeze modifier which resulted in this.

I was pleased with this result as it gave the buildings more of a fluid and lavish structure, opposed to the tedious modular style I originally had in mind. I moved forward with this new grace by testing it in engine!

In Engine:

Near the start of the week I was informed that I needed to keep the scene in either third-person or First-person perspective. This meant recreating the cell-shaded blueprint again… Or did it?

When creating the new scene in first person perspective I decided to import my buildings first, just to get a feeling for size and scale as one would do. However, I soon realised that the scene looked rather exceptional without the cell-shaded post processor on it. Why was this?

The scene on the left is without the cell-shader material blueprint and the one on the right is. As you cans see they both look splendid. Nevertheless it was a difficult choice between the two.

After talking with some lectures and friends, I came to the conclusion that the scene without cell shading was superior. This was because on the cell shaded image you focus almost instinctively on the way it is shaded and the thickness and fluidity of the black outlines, ergo on the non-cell shaded version, you immediately focus on the architecture, shapes and forms and concentrate on the buildings. So would I rather have you focus on my engine skills?

Or have you focus on my modelling skills, colour pallet work and overall idea?

I went for the latter of the two.

From here I decided to make the scene look more like a city and therefore played around with height and scale buy having one side of the road flow down a hill whilst the other would gradually climb one. This made it more compact and small, giving it a busy feel even though there was not much assets in the scene.

Overall I feel like this half of the week has gone rather well. I have come across new and influential ideas that have drastically improved my scene as well as ideas that have helped overcome hurdles that I had no ideas existed.

Thanks for reading.

I’ll see you guys very soon, this is Hazrat Signing off!