Skip to main content

Final Major Project [Post 12] ~ Redesigned Rooms and Scary Portraits

Here is a video showing what my level currently looks like, it shows the working doors, new library key actions and more stealable things.

As I briefly mentioned in one of my past posts, I have been moving assets about to create more interesting layouts, the most noticeable are the sitting room and the library. I have added more chairs and rugs to the sitting room to make it more cosy and less empty feeling, I would like to experiment with the chairs some more to make them look more impressive, maybe play around with some normal maps. I have recently picked up a copy of NDO2 so this might be a good program to use for this sort of thing, but we shall see as I have never used it before. I will also add some mirrors to the walls in the sitting room as manor houses often did this to make the rooms look bigger. 


In the library I put more focus into the seating area, adding a chaise longue and moving some of the bookcases around. I changed some of the colours of the books as well to add more diversity. I don't think that there is much more to do in the library, I am quite happy with it as it is. Of course I have to work on the fireplace, but this is the case with all of the rooms and I will probably just reuse the same fireplace interior, I would like it to be filled with glowing embers/logs.
The study area just needs a few little tweaks, like I feel that the desk is too high, the bust should be somewhere else, but other than that and the addition of some paintings and a war newspaper, this area will be finished. I am very happy with the fretwork on the room dividers, it is only a simple alpha texture, but I feel that it gives more of a finished look to the room.

I worked a lot on the interior of the treasure room, I had previously ignored this room and concentrated more on the other rooms, but this is the finale of the level so it needed some work. I have reused a lot of the stealable assets that were dotted around the level, as a hint that "this is what you could have stolen" incase the player missed anything. 
This room is supposed to look very cluttered and abandoned, like the treasures have just been thrown in there and forgotten over the years. I might have a congratulations message come up on the screen when the player enters and maybe a twinkly treasure noise. However I think I mainly need to look at the colour scheme/lighting in this room as it is very bright and "in your face"!

I was a little concerned about the paintings throughout my level, currently I only have finished paintings in the dining room, and 2 paintings in the hall. Because of this I begrudgingly took some photos of myself dressed up and Photoshopped them to look less like me and more like paintings, I don't think that this is cheating as they are my own photos, I haven't taken them from the internet and I am admitting here that I didn't paint them myself. 
I did this to save time as my digital painting skills aren't great and it would have taken me days to properly paint a portrait from scratch, let alone a few portraits as I am not very quick with painting. 

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Final Major Project [Post 11] ~ Working Locks and Melting Brains

I finally found a way to get my library door/key to work correctly, it took a lot of researching and random testing but it finally has the desired effect! Now the player can approach the library door, it wont open but will display [Door Locked] on screen, until the player gets the key. The key is in one of the drawers in the dining room that open when you get near. I had a problem here with the key in the drawer, if the player didn’t pick up the key once the drawer had been open and then closed again, the key would stay floating and clipping through the front of the drawer. I tried a few ways of fixing this but the more I did to it, the worse it got (key was now reappearing and floating in place when player had collected key, secondary key would not go away.) So I took a small break, watched a brain-melting episode of Jeremy Kyle and then came back to the problem, for some reason I managed to fix it straight away, its like all of a sudden it made sense to me. It is very importan...

Final Major Project [Post 4] ~ Building, Building and more Building

Recently I have been like an asset making machine, I have really been enjoying sitting in front of 3D Studio Max and churning out various assets for my level. I feel like I am definitely getting a lot faster with building in 3D and I am pleased with most of the things that I have made. My level was looking very sparse but hopefully once I have put all of these assets into my level, then it will look more like a manor house. I am not really looking forward to unwrapping or texturing some of these assets though as some have very rounded parts that will be difficult to unwrap neatly. I am going to pay more attention to making my unwraps a lot neater in this project though, as I feel that has let me down in past projects, although looking at my assets now, most of them will share the same tileable textures of wood or gold. I made a paint-over of my library, as I couldn't get the ceiling to look right, by doing my paint-over, I realised that the ceiling wasn't high enou...

Final Major Project [Post 1] ~ Ideas

It’s time for me to start my final major project, I have been thinking about what I would like to do for a while now but have never settled on a complete idea. I always wanted to build a large ornate manor house, because I love going to National Trust properties and other manor houses and I already have a lot of reference pictures. I presented my idea in front of my university class and about 5 tutors and the feedback that I got on my idea was mainly positive, (which in a way I was surprised about and glad) the only thing that they weren’t happy about is that I wanted to create the interior AND exterior of the house, they said it would be too much work and probably wouldn’t look right as different game engines are better for different things like this. They gave me a choice which was: I could do the exterior of an existing building, it would be an exact copy of the building but in 3D and would be more of a presentation piece that they would possibly show in a museu...