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Sketchbook: Tom

polycounter lvl 7
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tom990 polycounter lvl 7

Hi guys, long time lurker here- finally posting to try and motivate myself and keep track of progress. I'm fairly new to 3d, having worked in 2d for a few years as an illustrator I'm now looking to broaden my skills and my options for the future a bit.

So to start here's a long term project I've been working on to recreate one of my favourite video game locations- the town of Suran from the game Morrowind. It's very nostalgic to me- and I really wanted to see it realised in a more "visually fulfilling" manner shall we say? I'm not going to keep exactly to the original design but rather to take the basic features and layout and then interpret the location in my own way.

Here's a picture of Suran from the original game: 


The idea is to bring Into a modern game engine (Unreal Engine 4) and along the way to learn all the necessary skills to take an asset from concept to completion and placement in the game engine, as well as the ins and outs of the engine itself.

Ok, to start here's the docks. With a little Unreal fella for scale. A textureless Red mountain is visible in the top left of the image.

Here's the bridge where a player typically enters the town for the first time- after walking through the lush fields of the Ascadian Isles. Right now it's just a box- but eventually It'll be beautiful rope bridge. That grey lump in the middle distance is placeholder for a Siltstrider.

Here's the entrance to the town. Already I've taken a few liberties with the design.

The central plaza. The bottom left building is in fact a strip club.

The temple, which I've made a little bigger and more dramatic. I almost want that Hagia Sophia on the Istanbul skyline effect- something to fix the composition of the town. Note that none of these assets are finished. Most don't have lightmaps or textures and those that do are temporary or work in progress.

Looking down the main "street". I've set some of the buildings up so you can walk straight in- which you could never do in the original game without a loading screen. Because of that loading screen transition the designers of the original game were never compelled to actually make the insides of the buildings match the outsides. Consequently Morrowind houses have a Tardis-like quality of being more spacious and labyrinthine inside than they should be. I don't have that luxury here. I've yet to decide how to approach that...

Finally- here's an overview of the world looking towards Vivec- the largest city in the game. It's not meant to be seen from this height so you can see the limits of the world on the left there.

...And another looking in the opposite direction. Morrowind fans may notice that among other things I've expanded the docks and added a boat. I always thought the description of the town didn't tally with it's layout. And the bigger docks seemed necessary. Of course this approach  taken to it's logical conclusion would mean me adding all the other things a "real" feeling town needs like the residential areas, toilets and clothes lines and all the other minutiae of civilisation. I have to prevent myself from actually doing all that since I've got enough on my plate as it is!

I've got a long way to go, but I'm pretty happy with basic bones I have so far. Right now I'm struggling with particle systems- so once I've got that down it'll be time to add some smoke to Red Mountain! 

Thanks for looking! :)

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