Monday 13 January 2014

Third year: Final Major Project - The Wizard House :)



Final Major Project Brief
The brief

My final major project brief will be ‘Natural Building and Natural Living’ I will have this placed in a private garden / land, with natural materials for the build of the buildings and the environment.  They will all simulate being hand calved for that extra care in detail and unique designs. 

The environment

The place will inhabit a Wizard / Mage, who is self-sufficient and lives of his own land/ garden. This allows me to add cool factors of fantasy fairy tale elements, such as strange creatures, plants, flowers, fire flies, mushrooms and trees.  They also have a purpose to be there because the Wizard would use his own garden to create spells, herbs and medicine. The perimeter of the garden will be protected by a large stone wall with a front gate entrance and uneven ground leading to the wizard’s house crossing a small bridge, with ornaments, statues, signs, pots, ponds, wells, and others are around the garden.

The wizard house

The wizard house will have the essentials; symbolic handcrafted furniture, table, chairs, bed, fireplace, lights/candles, spiral staircase, kitchen, left out food, with the interesting wizard assets such as spells, books, wands, potions, staffs, swords, cloaks and many more.
SFX will be used around the level.

The budget

·         Game platform: mid to high end, ps3, Xbox 360 and PC.
·         Genre: RPG
·         Primary Reference: I will go and visit Leicester Botanical Gardens to get plants, flowers and other information, if I need to extend this research I can always go to Birmingham Botanical Gardens. I have bunch of primary references that will aid me in my asset creation and texturing.
·         Secondary Reference: I will look at films such as The Hobbit and Harry Potter for inspiration / ideas to gain awareness into the fantasy realm and acumens of wizardry. Natural homes will be great resource when I design my level, assets and building. They are real world homes with a lot of individual, personal, cultural attachments to its reason of design / location. That has natural handcrafted materials like wood, clay, cob, stone, thatch and more, that my level will comprise to require?
·         Modelling budget: Models – 150,000 Triangles
·         Texture budget: 252mb = 21.0 RGP Textures @ 2048x2048 (.tga)
The textures will have default of diffuse colour maps, normal maps and specular maps and additional texture maps such as skybox, alphas, emissive, special effects and particles.
·         Software: Unreal Development Kit, 3Ds Max, Zbrush, Adobe Photoshop, Crazy Bump, Ndo2, Xnormals.

Time scale and schedule:

My time scale and schedule must be at its optimum in order to finish two/ one week before the deadline, which allows me to optimise and review my work. I have broken down the weeks of my schedule for me to follow and achieve.

3 Weeks: references, mood boards, sketches, concepts, designs, whitebox environment and larger assets.
4 Weeks: models, unwrap, lightmap, import, textured environment, SFX effects/ particles. With blogging, feedback and testing continuously
4 Weeks: models, unwrap, lightmap, import, textured environment effects/ particles. With blogging, feedback and testing continuously
4 Weeks: SFX effects/ Particles, bug-testing, improve models/ textures or adding. House clean files, prepare a fly-through and finish documentation.
1 Week: Completed and tripled checking it all work and load.

The challenges

·         Time management
·         Keeping to an fix schedule
·         Learning UDK
·         Creating visual effects
·         Keeping player interested in focal points
·         Assertive decision making
·         Keeping to an art direction and following up my 2D designs
·         Effective pipeline and strategy

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