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Helicopter
Hey guys. Hope you’ve all been doing well and had a good Halloween/Bonfire night as well. So we’ve been working on our 3rd escape route. I’ve been rather excited about this one as the player must escape by air via helicopter. (You know how to fly a helicopter, right?)
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Originally, I had thought of modelling something similar to the Bell 206 Jet Ranger helicopter (image above courtesy of Wikipedia), what seemed to be a common model of helicopter around the 1970s. However, I had wanted to make something that looked a bit more sea-borne to really fit with the setting.
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I took a lot of inspiration from the Sikorsky S-61 (Shown above), an American amphibious helicopter with a rather interesting looking boat-like hull. This helicopter was however far too large for us, so in the end, I ended up with a mishmash of the two helicopter models:
Isn’t it cute! 📷
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The orange/blue livery was chosen, not only to make it stand out, but to make the colour scheme consistent with the other escape routes as some sort of abandoned rescue helicopter. (Just a note. These images are taken from the Maya viewport. They will look slightly different in our game’s Unity engine)
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I tried adding some floatation devices in an attempt to better fit the helicopter into the ocean setting, but as the player was unable to reach the door without a set animation over these devices, I ended up removing them for simplicity. The tri-count for the model is a little high as the interior had to also be modelled.
New Items
In addition to the helicopter, we modelled new equipment for the player to play about with…
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We’ve got some bolt cutters which are part of some new gameplay mechanics that are being implemented. I’ll leave it for the design blog to talk about these mechanics but here is an image of them in the Maya viewport.
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We’ve now got GUNS! Now you can shoot your way off the ship like James Bond! Okay. Maybe not “lethal” guns….but still a gun nonetheless. We’ve got a rare flare gun in which the player can use tactically against the beasts of the ship.
Andy cheekily branded it the “Dart” gun as I have a thing for modelling weapons…
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Lastly, we’ve got this device above. Who on earth knows what this could be used for?
Hmmmmm.
Exterior
We gave you a sneak peak at the exterior in our previous art post and we’ve made quite some progress in this area.
Though some of this is still currently being implemented into the game, we can show you more textured shots in Autodesk Maya….
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“It’s kinda like Lego for boats” describes our artist Andy. Above are only some of the many pieces that he is working through that make up the exterior.
The pieces we made allow for great flexibility in changing the size and shape of the ship. When put together, our programmers are to make the ship as wide or long, tall or short as they wish. An example of it all put together is shown below.
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As there are many repeating parts, one of the challenges our artist Andy has to overcome is to make sure the texturing looks right repeated. Too little variation, and each piece looks really plain. Too much, and the repeating gets really noticeable. This also varies depending on how close or far the player can see these pieces. This isn’t so much a problem inside, as the player is always close up to these pieces, but on the outside, they can see much more and this is where repeating textures that are too “unique” start to break immersion.
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On top of the walkways shown above, we will have lots of deck-specific deco that we are almost finished with. It’s shaping up to become one of my favourite parts of the level.
Lighting Tests
Finally, I’ve been doing some more lighting tests in my unity scene as I feel that some parts of the ship are far too dark. These are not currently in the Alpha build yet.
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Lower Deck Workshop
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Upper Deck Bunk Room
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Main Deck Walkways
That’s all for now!
Keep your eyes peeled for our next blog update!