BA3B - Research Report

During this project I will be creating a 3D environment based off the game Gears of War, the reason for this is because the company I want to work for were the developers (Splash Damage). The second reason why I'm doing it is because a previous employee of theirs David Garrett created a 3D piece for them during his final years of University and managed to land himself a job in doing so (This can be viewed on his artstation). The idea behind my scene is to create a indoor trashed room which has rubble, brickwork missing and other indentations to the building work. I began by looking at his piece and how it resembles real life or even if it does, judging by the work done, the structure itself would be more jagged in places because of the destruction of one of the supports. Although this could be considered as minor it can also be considered as major dependent on the layout of the building and how much open space there is within it. If anymore on this floor were to be broken alongside the same area you will see more structural damage but due to the amount of information shown in the images it can be seen as something that is fine. This is going to be the idea I want to give off, I will be attempting half a room or basement filled with assets like this therefore structural integrity will have to be considered. Dependent I will try to follow the same resemblance as the image below in terms of rooms and size alongside structural integrity.



I will be looking into Gears of War 4 (the most recent Gears of War) and playing it I can get a understanding of how the game is designed as well as the story lines they follow. The good thing about this is knowing how the environments are meant to look, atmosphere for situations and also how they use the environment to tell a story. Other than this I will be looking into the structures overall look and feel from the game, meaning my style will match theirs along with colour palette and assets production.



The first thing I looked into was the idea of creating a bombed out house, something along the style of WW2 but then I remembered about the amazing architecture there was once in Syria. The idea behind this was to have a collection of props gathered from around the world given off the idea that the previous home-owner was a collector with rich values. The tiles above represent some floor tiles shown in a Syrian living quarters which I will be trying to emulate in terms of overall feel of the room as well as concepts from other regions of the world. Although this house will be bombed and partially destroyed it will still have its main structural integrity in tact it will also need to have placed damage and a environmental story line behind it meaning that I will need to lay the room out in such a way it shows that he is a collector.

After reading the Traditional Syrian Architecture PDF I found out some nice placements of tiles, structural pipelines and also how brick layouts work alongside what they're made out of. Normally a house would contain tiles or brick work but seeing as I'm going for a collectors house within such a enclosed location and having there be rubble lying around I was going to make a plaster wall which would be cheaper to make but be more of a chauvinistic form for the cultures he or she is reaching out to.

I've also been looking into lighting already, after talking to Luan Vetoreti in abundance on portfolio pieces he recommended that if I was to do a up-scaled lighting system that can really show off my work I would want to use something like lighting propagation volumes. It was originally going to be using the same method as light-mass global illumination but that would only use static/stationary lighting meaning that the detail wouldn't reach quite as close to the dynamic version that light propagation will impact. The documents I followed to get an understanding of this is in my references.

Composition is key! Luan Vetoreti, Jack Kirkham, Sergey Lysenko have all told me that this is the most important piece out of all of the above. This is why starting lighting is so important, once you get your lighting and composition they way you want it the scene will fall together, although you would work the scene up as a whole getting these key frames in will allow you to progress so much further.

Learning from John Barnard after emailing with him back and forth, I will be making my portfolio tailored to what I want and where I want to go in terms of the industry therefore I will be attempting to create this Syrian house with a move to move or otherwise known as cover to cover motion allowing the player to enter the room or even kick down the doors of the room and immediately find cover and start the cover to cover motions. Making the room balanced around this area of composition.

All conversations and information given by industry standard people can be found in the blog post 'Employability & Job searching'.

Now that we have that out of the way, greyboxing the scene is necessary now and getting the layout correct is my next step. Moving forward I will take all of these elements into consideration.

References:

Understand Building Construction. (2019). Concrete Frame Construction | Concrete Frame Structures. [online] Available at: http://www.understandconstruction.com/concrete-frame-structures.html [Accessed 28 Jan. 2019].

https://www.artstation.com/artwork/nYPmO (David Garretts Artstation)

Lighting: 

https://docs.unrealengine.com/en-us/Engine/Rendering/LightingAndShadows/LightPropagationVolumes?fbclid=IwAR0rZJG2s4TpIkylOF7HwbC6cYkHHBT2ZwajPro6bbCFzf7kOZgwyma74MI

https://docs.unrealengine.com/en-US/Engine/Rendering/LightingAndShadows/Lightmass