Art Blog 15 – Control rooms, Containers rooms….and Sausage fingers.

Hey all,

In our last art blog we showed you sections of the engine room that we had been working on. Since then we have been finishing up the basic components that make up this area of the ship.

Below, Tait shows some images of the control room he has been working on, as well as some tricks he has been using to efficiently texture these sections.

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Hi. Tait here…

Here are some work in progress shots of the engine control room. Turns out ships this size are quite complex so we wanted to make the control units look busy and detailed. I reused parts of the assets from the bridge and updated them for use in this room. Some new additions were also added to give these control panels a unique feel.

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Among these new things are general buttons, dials and readings. These were made entirely in Photoshop and assigned to flat planes inside of Maya. Then its simply a case of dragging the UV’s around to the part you want! The normal map used on these give the impression that there is geometry there, even though they are just 2 triangles. There is still plenty of room in this ‘button’ texture map so we can add more variation when the time comes.

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I have also added a whole bunch of new floors and mats to be used around the ship. Using a small texture that tiles 4 ways, we can create a variety of mats of different sizes, using a small texture and very little geometry whilst retaining detail.

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COOL HUH!? Bye!

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If you’ve been watching any of the let’s plays/first looks online you may have noticed the rather unappealing player hands. You’ll be happy to know that the placeholder player model has now been removed and replaced with a newer, better looking one. No more sausage fingers! With this model comes a whole set of new player animations that Judy has worked on which encompasses more nervous characteristics, creating a higher level of immersion. Below is a short clip of one of the Judy’s idle animations….

As for myself, I’ll finish off this blog with some work in progress shots of the upcoming container room in the below section of the ship. In this section, the player will have to navigate through a huge maze of broken cargo containers with (in time) some interesting bits and bobs within them.

Here we have some untextured model pieces that will be used to construct this section of the ship.

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This area will not have many lights, so you’ll have to stock up on your light sources!

(Better bring some glow sticks just in-case!)