Hangar Spaceship

Since PPD2 needed 3 models I decided to make a detailed spaceship for that module. However, as I found out the spaceship modelling will count under A3D work and will get marked together with the hangar.
 Thus I will go over the spaceship modelling progress over here.

Originally I wanted to completely design my own stealth fighter, but as it was taking longer and longer I realized that I need some proper guidance. I went through 10 design stages in all. Improving on aspects I was not happy with every time.

Hangar Alpha

This time I will give an overview of what I have been working on for the hangar alpha presentation.

For the alpha I rushed a bit, but managed to get everything textured. I went for a simple plated look. There are no normal maps. Instead I painted on all black plating lines with layer styles in photoshop.
For the colors I went with light and dark gray. I felt that gray was very general for metal, but also gave the hangar a more industrial feel. For the third color, I went with a darker green to bring some life to trimmings around the walking areas. I was also considering orange, but it felt too aggressive at the time.

I am quite proud of the glass shader I made. Granted I had to look at a few tutorials, but in the end I mixed together this particular one by experimenting for a while.
 This build also features the final lighting. It took some time to figure out how lighting works, but in the end I was able to make all the lights dynamic, which saved me a week of lightmapping time. For the lights I asked a class mate for help and after I understood the types and what stats I can tweak it only took a few hours to get a good result.

After the alpha presentation, I will have to start working on the metal shader for the hangar. Getting that right will certainly help with the atmosphere.
 Another big hurdle is to put in slight grime to all the surfaces to better match the concept art.

Hangar blockout

In this blog I will go over my thoughts as I was making the A3D module environment for university.

The brief had us choose a piece of concept art, that we would base off a small environment. We could still keep some artistic liberty to change the scene to our liking.
 At the time I was quite interested in Star Citizen and wanted to do a futuristic hangar environment to impress the people working on the game. And since I had to have 3 models for PPD2, I also wanted to make a spaceship. The hangar and spaceship would be very high fidelity, with animations and nice shaders. These grand ideas would come back to bite me later on.
 For the game engine to render my little world I chose unreal engine 3. The other choice was cry engine, but having had previous experience with UDK made the choice simple. I knew that I had no time to get used to the cry engine and was even pushing unreal deadlines with this massive project.

Once I knew I was making a hangar I just had to find the right concept art. After some searching, only one really caught my eye. This piece was made by a Russian artist named Kagerott.

What really caught my eye were the hard edged structures and the softer plating between them. I thought it made a nice contrast. I also liked the walkway on one side and a cargo area on the other. By making all wall pieces modular I can easily make the hangar bigger to accommodate any size spaceship inside.
 I decided to cut off the very far back with a simple wall. This makes my job a bit easier. Another modification I decided to add was a second level that you can access via a elevator. This idea came straight from Star Citizen that has the same configuration. It also fit well with the concept.
 The only downside to using this concept is the lack of dynamic elements. This may come back to bite me, but I have not found a better solution.

Here is the first lowpoly blockout. The blockout did not take in to account the lighting however.

As you can see, I have stayed very true to the original concept, only making the main hangar area much wider.

The main problem I ran in to was the design for the main hangar door. As it is a large eye catcher I feel it is important to get it right.