Mech Prototype Facility

purplekami

Hi Polycount!

Senior Game Art student here working on my first major environment, I want to do something involving lots of hard-surface modelling so that I can improve my workflow as much as possible.

Latest:


Final Video:
https://vimeo.com/195472553

purplekami

Quick little update, started modelling the center piece robot. It's in early block out stages so any feedback on what could make it look better would be sweet. For scale purposes it's about 3 humans tall so it'll look down at the player.

jose.fuentes

this is looking cool! interested in seeing where you take this

my only feedback is that your center piece robot is too symmetrical, try to find a way to bring some asymmetry in your model!

purplekami

jose.fuentes said:

this is looking cool! interested in seeing where you take this

my only feedback is that your center piece robot is too symmetrical, try to find a way to bring some asymmetry in your model!

Thank you so much! Yeah I'm trying to bring asymmetry in the back, and right now the other way I can break symmetry in a manner I want would be in the arm shapes, so I'm still debating if it would be worthwhile?

Anyways here's my progress for the day, got mostly everything hooked up in a way I'm happy with so I'm about ready to start really hammering in the details. Might try a pro-boolean workflow for this.

purplekami

Been a busy week! I'm working on my graduation project on the side so I don't get to work on this piece quite as much as I would like, however I'm making good progress, finally done replacing all the modular brushes with meshes I can work on in Maya. I'm now ready to do extensive detail passings on the assets, work on greebling everything, and starting to work more on the materials themselves. I did a very first pass of lighting trying to get a feel for it, but changing the materials from a default metal to a new one changed the ambiance vastly (as expected) so the room feels way too sterile / hospital-esque right now. I'm excited to keep going!

purplekami

Been another tough week in terms of school work but I'm excited for the direction this is going. I decided to take a first crack at materials. I'm still inexperienced with the Substance products but they're incredibly fun to learn and I'm happy with the first results! I'm in the process of doing detail passes on the individual assets and getting them prepped up for texturing.

Eric Chadwick

Looking great! Though, PNGs suck on Polycount.

KurtR

Really liking the scale you got going there for your mech, and the shape language of it so far. It's going to be interesting to see where you take this.

purplekami

Eric Chadwick said:

Looking great! Though, PNGs suck on Polycount.

Thank you for the heads-up, I'll make sure to upload jpegs from now on! And thanks for the compliment ^^

Here's a little update for this week, sadly my other classes are eating a ton of my time so progress is slow but I'm heading in a direction I enjoy. I'm currently figuring out what level of detail I want to go with (Ideally as much as possible) and also playing with the lighting some more. I'd really appreciate feedback on the textures I've made so far! I want to turn down the level of grime on the drills since they're not consistent with the generators / floors.

Sajeet

really cool! Are you working from a concept? it would be nice to see those aswell! Looking forward to see this coming together

purplekami

Sajeet said:

really cool! Are you working from a concept? it would be nice to see those aswell! Looking forward to see this coming together

I'm mostly working off of a mood board, these are my main references in terms of mood and space I want to go for, otherwise it's mostly been trying to improve my skills at environmental design.



In terms of more concrete references for individual assets I've been drawing a lot from the following because I like the forms and levels of detail they've got going. 



All of these I found simply by typing "scifi environment" on pinterest and scrolling down the feed, saving anything I like and want to add to my environment!

Sajeet

Ah nice! I really enjoy seeing this come together

purplekami

Slowly coming along, got a lot of feedback on what I can do to improve the narrative along with the lighting by focusing back to the center piece now that the environment is slowly getting the detailing I want.





More texture passes as well, starting to get a good feel for the materials now and I'm happy with the colors. Gotta keep going!

purplekami

More updates! I redid the center piece, and whilst I like the direction it's going in I think I'm going to change it once more to be more of a liquid containment as opposed to an opening capsule thing.

I've gotten really good feedback on what to improve on next, both in terms of lighting and composition, so I'm excited to spend the next week working on those improvements. I'm also really excited to also have a chance at working on the robot since he's still in the blocking out stage, there's a lot of silhouette changes I need to make.

purplekami

More progress! Time to tear down the walls and ceiling and design them better, any other feedback would be greatly appreciated. I'm a little stressed in terms of direction for the new walls since right now they're real filler looking and don't want to repeat the same mistake.

purplekami

Tweaked some more of the lighting to make the metal look a little more metallic, still got a lot of texture work to do.
 This is closer to what the main shot will be like:

purplekami

It's finally finished! Or rather in a state where I'm willing to make adjustments to any glaring / easy to fix problems, but also ready to move onto something new with my new found knowledge.




Here's a video to give a better look at the environment:
https://vimeo.com/195472553

Tomiajayi

Awesome! I was hoping to see more mech parts and bits lying around though.

Colton

Hey Alexis! Wish I'd found your thread earlier. I love how this came together. A few of us were talking about it in the lab and everyone liked your mech a lot. I can't wait to see what you come up with next semester:D

purplekami

Tomiajayi said:

Awesome! I was hoping to see more mech parts and bits lying around though.

Absolutely, if I was more experienced I would add a lot more detail and cohesion between the environment and center piece. Next time I'll make sure to!

Colton said:

Hey Alexis! Wish I'd found your thread earlier. I love how this came together. A few of us were talking about it in the lab and everyone liked your mech a lot. I can't wait to see what you come up with next semester:D

Thank you so much! It certainly grew a lot over time. I can't wait to see what amazing works you guys produce next as well!

purplekami

Finally got around to making a video of the environment, unfortunately lost a lot of quality due to compression but it gives a bit of atmosphere to the project.

Mech Facility Environment by Alexis from Alexis Faintreny on Vimeo.