UTMC - Dead gate
polycounter lvl 14
Hey folks.
I'm mostly just doing this for fun, it's a good excuse for me to break in my new laptop
I am quite unfamiliar with the Unreal universe. I played UT2004 with some friends way back in the day but that is the extent of my knowledge. I was always more of a Counter-Strike kid back then :P
I saw the "Space Castles" theme and thought that was pretty cool, so I wanted to do something orbiting a planet.
Anywho, I threw this together yesterday. It probably does not fit into the Unreal universe, but I'll do some more researching as I go along to tweak the architectural language.
I'm thinking of a dead warp gate where the players could be running around the disc nearest the destroyed core. It'd be a circular vehicle map and players could launch through the blue goo / debris with launch pads.
Even land on some debris in the middle to collect power ups, weapons, and ammo, or hop on one of a few ships and have a SPACE BATTLE!
I'm mostly just doing this for fun, it's a good excuse for me to break in my new laptop
I am quite unfamiliar with the Unreal universe. I played UT2004 with some friends way back in the day but that is the extent of my knowledge. I was always more of a Counter-Strike kid back then :P
I saw the "Space Castles" theme and thought that was pretty cool, so I wanted to do something orbiting a planet.
Anywho, I threw this together yesterday. It probably does not fit into the Unreal universe, but I'll do some more researching as I go along to tweak the architectural language.
I'm thinking of a dead warp gate where the players could be running around the disc nearest the destroyed core. It'd be a circular vehicle map and players could launch through the blue goo / debris with launch pads.
Even land on some debris in the middle to collect power ups, weapons, and ammo, or hop on one of a few ships and have a SPACE BATTLE!
Replies
There have been plenty more space-maps including my favorites Space-Noxx and Hyperblast. Hyperblast literally has you jumping out into the vacuum of space in the middle of a starwars-y warp drive. So the lesson here is, UT is ridiculous and awesome not realistic.
Is your idea ridiculous? yeah, but it could also be awesome fighting on space junk debri. How would that work? Well that's up to Epic, it might be game-breaking to have the debri physically drift when you interacted with it, so they would likely set up pre-determined paths. I think it's especially cool you gave the jump-pad center thing some back-story because it's a dead warp gate it only pushes a little bit instead of flinging someone into the next star system
For reference on the ridiculous nature of old UT pre-UT3
Facing Worlds. One of the most famous UT maps is just two pyramidal structures on a broken up asteroid... just because.
Morpheus. Impossibly tall skyscrapers reaching into space well past the stratosphere.
Space Noxx
Even for as realistically gritty UT3 went, they still had the UT99 classic map Space Noxx which takes place spinning in space. Why can people breathe in space without astronaut suits? Who cares! it's awesome that's why.
Phobos, another favorite orbiting the Phobos moon. But that's not important, thats just the setting. What is important is that the level is awesome letting you go on the inside and outside of the space station and the gravity changes depending on inside or out! So the possibilities are very limitless
These maps and others have been constantly remade by Epic or the fans on basically every version, they're fan favorites and a large part of that is just due to the ridiculous nature of the theme. Realistic UT is not, just focus on making something be awesome.
All of that aside, if the ring here is the main thing to look at. It probably doesn't fit the visual-form language of UT, at least on this shot. Maybe if you showed more of the interior of the gate for scale reference we could get a better idea or just stick a figure on the gate for size reference.
I don't know if you envision this as a zero gravity environment or how that would work, we'll leave that up to Epic. I would say if you envision players jumping from between debri just keep making cool space junk and go from there. Thematically though it's already great!
I plan on doing a second shot that better demonstrates the play space along the ring of the blue core.
I'm thinking of something that's actually quite similar to this:
I did a tiny tweak to my first shot with placement of a few things.
2nd, closer shot.
This is a zoom-in of the previous shot... just kind of showing my idea of player scale within the environment.
This looks killer man, looks like you went and abandoned your old idea of having you jump through the gate and instead the "map" IS the gate. Probably a better choice to wrap your head around a level theme
Yeah I work with 3D a lot. It's great in a professional environment because you can hand off your work files to production artists and it also allows you to accurately render perspective and lighting.
I model & texture some key assets in 3D, pose it, light it, then break it into render layers, compose them in Photoshop, and cast a few spells and viola
but man.. looks badass! I also see you work at bungie, which made me compare it to hellmouth instantly!
That was the inspiration
Yeah if I can manage to pull something out within 5 hours tonight after work I'd like to do something much closer in the playspace, but I doubt 5 hours is enough time to make it look good. I'd need at least 2 days, most likely.
But, should my concept be chosen, they give the opportunity to create some more shots. Doing a shot down in the gameplay area would definitely be what I'd do.
Oh, and just realized the deadline is -7. I am in -8 so that means I'd have to be done with it at 10:59pm tonight. That's not going to happen.
Well, good luck to all entrants! I'm excited to see who they choose, and more excited to see what extra shots they make from what they have
I wanted a bit more focus around the "core" of the gate for this shot, so I added some blue, thin strips just to give it a tad more pop.
It could work, i know warp gate'/jump gate's (or something that did look like a warp gate of sort's) exist in unreal (confirmed from the unreal tournament 3 cinematic movie) as do warp drives/translight drives and other alternatives aswell, so i feel it won't be out of place in the unreal universe at all, afterall the games take place in a time where ultra super high tech does exists so why not?
I mean floating villages/cities/castles exist in unreal, so trust me it's not out of place.
I simplified the larger shapes and knocked some detail back with gradients.
I then intensified small scale detail in a few key points of interest.