Brandon Mellors

Engine: Unreal Engine 4                                                                                                                                            Time to Create: ~150 hours

Models: Autodesk Maya                                                                                                                                               Texture Limit: 6144x6144

Textures: Photoshop, Quixel

 

'The Scientist's Machine' was a University module for Intermediate 3D. The goal was to create two rooms, one small and one with the machine in. The priority in this task was to create and use modular pieces. We had to maintain a futuristic feel throughout the scene, with semi-realistic textures, within the texture limit for each type of map.

 

My original idea was to create an eco-dome, with overgrown plants in the centre due to my machine, which was going to create organics. This created my first problem.

 

The dome was a task that took up way too much time. I started out with a hexagonal plane, surrounded by a frame. After spending a few hours piecing these planes together to try and form the shape of this geodesic dome, with no avail, I decided I was going at this wrong. I did some more research and found that many eco-domes were built out of triangles, unlike the domes that I'd seen at the Eden Project in Cornwall.

 

Creating a plane and frame in a triangle shape, I realised this was going to take absolutely ages if I was to make sure everything absolutely perfect; there had to be another way. Searching through the tools on Maya, I found the ability to create a dodecahedron, which I smoothed to get my desired shape. To finalise this shape, I straightened out all the lines running horizontally as they weren't flat at the bottom. Using the bevel and extrude tools, I created a frame too.

 

Once finished with the dome, I moved on to my modular pieces to create a corridor and small room. I found my modular pieces to be more detailed than others, which I was happy with as I wanted my models to be more complex; texturing isn't my best area, so I wanted to work to my strengths.

My walls started out as a plane, which I started playing with until it was in a shape that I was satisfied with. From there, I started to add various pieces, such as pipes and extrusions to my wall. However, I wanted more variation, so I decided to take the wall I had created and make a window version by deleting the central face and adding some inside parts to add depth. This window design changed later, and will be discussed in the 'In Unreal Engine 4' section of this report.

 

To prevent any seams in them, I made a simple bracket piece to go between my walls. This followed the general shape of the wall itself, but protruded out more.

 

The size of my modular floor was a debated part of my work, as the thickness of my brackets made one piece of modular floor seem too small, but two pieces a little large. In the end, I went with having two moderately sized modular floor pieces coming together to create a wide corridor. My original idea for the floor pieces was to have wires underneath a grate, however I wasn't happy with any cable formations that I had created and I found them to be a waste of my poly count.

 

I decided to create a pit, from which my machine was suspended over. To create this pit, I made a cylinder, deleted the outside faces, and cut in to a quarter; this saves me time unwrapping and allows for higher resolution textures on each face.

 

The new machine had no direct inspiration from media, but more from learning how to easily create pipes/cables in Maya, which made me want to play around with this octopus like structure for my machine.