Codemasters Vehicle Brief

I started off this project by reading the brief a few times and still being reasonably confused by what shaders were and how to use them, also I didn’t understand the part of actually opening the program and the code part completely confused me. However I decided I would just get on and build something. After researching various types of vehicle, I decided I wanted to make a combat vehicle, something in a similar style to the human vehicles from the Avatar film. They are reasonably futuristic looking, but still stick with the theme of combat vehicles today. I started off by creating a combat vehicle that I liked the look of, which was a Fox FV721 tank. I even screen captured the whole build and uploaded it to YouTube (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hdOPLh5iz_s). I decided that this wouldn’t be enough for this project as there was no design element to it, and I had only given myself half of the triangle budget to create it. So I did some more research and created something unique, from various tanks and combat vehicles that I liked the look of. I was overall quite happy with my design and impressed that I had come up with it as I am not very confident with vehicles as opposed to environments.

After building my design, I realised that the seating part at the front was quite bulky and too square looking, I had literally copied this from a TATRA 10x10 vehicle, so I put a bit more design thought into this. I decided that it didn’t really fit with the futuristic human combat vehicle look I was going for, so I decided to make it more spiky and interesting. I used the Batman tumbler vehicle as slight inspiration for this part of my vehicle, I am a massive fan of Batman and I love the style of the tumbler from the Dark Knight films.

I feel that this small change to the front of my vehicle has made a dramatic difference to the overall look and feel of it, I am very happy with this design. The overall build didn’t take very long at all, obviously I had no problems with the actual building, but coming up with a design that I was happy with, took me possibly more time that it should have done. I still managed to finish this model in the first week of the project though. I took quite a long time over the unwrapping and texturing of my vehicle, as I feel that unwrapping has been one of my weaknesses in my previous projects, but I took my time and created reasonably tidy texture maps, starting off with block colours first, then adding detail afterwards.

I didn’t create an interior for my vehicle, because I decided to have blacked out, bullet-proof windows, that is just described with a block colour material with an opacity filter on it at this moment in time. I have a feeling that the shaders will play a bit part in the look of the windows, but I am unsure so I will just concentrate on building and texturing for now.

I wanted to create quite a derelict looking portable shed type environment for my vehicle to be housed in. I am still sticking to the Avatar type idea that humans have travelled to an alien planet and have transported their combat vehicles to this planet, so the environment is going to look quite dirty and basically made from metal beams and concrete panels etc. I built and unwrapped my environment in a day, I enjoyed this part of the project quite a lot, as although my environment is reasonably basic, I think it sticks to my theme but at the same time focuses attention on the vehicle itself. I matched the doors in my environment to the doors on the vehicle, to tie it all in together. I am finding it quite natural to build, unwrap and texture things now, I am glad that I have finally got to this point, but I can’t seem to able to build high poly models. We have been given 10,000 tris for both the vehicle and the environment and even now I am only just over 13,000 for the whole scene!

After texturing the environment, I decided that lighting would be the next important thing to do in this project. Opening my project with the different graphics settings made my scene very dark, so lighting is definitely a must. I haven’t had any experience with lighting in 3DS Max before, I feel that I was previously at a disadvantage for not knowing this, but I taught myself how to use lights in UDK in the last project so it shouldn’t be that different. I noticed that a lot of the lights in the example scene are target spot lights, so I added one to my scene, resulting in what I would call a “Batman light”. Initially I thought I had added the wrong type of light and tried out a few of the others but then figured out that messing around with the settings of the light made it a lot more realistic and less like a magical beam of light! I have three light fittings in my scene that cast very dramatic shadows when they have lights in them making the rest of the scene very dark, shadowed and quite eerie but I feel that this makes the focus more on the vehicle itself (the main light will be coming from outside anyway).

At this point, I tried to bake in my lighting and shadows, unfortunately I again don’t have much experience with this, and couldn’t get it to work. I now know that it wouldn’t work because I had a multi-sub object with about 4 textures in it on my scene, so the baked map didn’t really work as the UV’s were technically overlapping when they were all together. So I have learnt the process of baking but it didn’t specifically work for this project, I now know for future reference though so it wasn’t a complete loss. I ended up painting some of the shadows onto my actual textures, and it achieved the same result as a shadow map would have done, and it was the only solution I could think of other than creating a completely new texture with everything on rather than separate textures, or creating a separate alpha texture for decals.

I had to create my skydome before creating the reflection map obviously, as it would use the detail from the skydome on the front face. I used a few images that I had collected of the sky, and blended them together with the cloud tool on Photoshop as well. I decided on a bright red sky and a bright purple ground. My original idea was to have purple grass, but I decided that sand dunes would better match the tracks on my vehicle.

Unfortunately, I had to redo all of my normal maps because the shaders automatically put them to 100% and then they cannot be changed, so I had to make them a lot less strong. I made my vehicle quite dull in terms of reflections, because it is supposed to be a worn battle-beaten tank, so the only thing that is properly reflective is the windows.

Overall I found the modelling and texturing of this project reasonably easy, I struggled with the shaders messing the normal maps up, but I enjoyed the opportunity to learn new things and I think I have achieved what the project was asking of me. I feel that I accomplished the theme I was going for with my vehicle and environment but ultimately I didn’t really enjoy the project because I felt like I didn’t know enough initially and I feel that I am not great at coming up with unique looking vehicles.