Happy new year! Back at university, and back to blogging after a lovely little break at home. The university year began with the Container City project. This is a group project where the basic idea is to create a game level , where the main building structures are shipping containers. We had two themes to chose from either Sci-fi, or Dystopia city. My group opted for the dystopia city. The project started off a bit slow considering no one in my group really knew about level design, let alone level design in unreal 4. I managed to get a extremely rough level plan out, but it was my team-mate Zhane that really solidified our level. In terms of concepting we threw around a few ideas for the setting and aim of our level, first starting with an uninhabited jungle/ island type setting, then we tried having our city built into the side of a cliff, but at that time we really didn't have something to commit to. The idea of having our city underground having fallen down from a sink-hole was thrown in the mix and for me that was definitely the most interesting idea for a level. So I did A little more research into sink-holes or environments similar to that and I stumbled upon a video of a marble quarry in the Apuan Alps, Northwest Italy.
The stark white environment of the quarry sold it to me as an environment, and that's are final environment. Looking at more pictures of marble quarries I realised that a lot of my references came from the same photographer, Edward Burtynsky who also published a book of beautifully detailed shots of quarries, Luckily this book was available in the library! It's now serving as the main inspiration for our levels environment.
Right now I'm going through the conception stage of the project, I volunteered to do the concepts for the basic, duplicated shack buildings of our town, and of the large end goal building. I grabbed some reference and made a mood board of several types of architecture to guide me. I looked up the locations of marble quarries were and tried to find some images of the homes in those areas to influence my concepts, but I didn't really find a lot to work with. So instead I searched wider geographically for some general shanty style shacks.
Right now I really want to get my concept done and approved so I can more onto basic paint overs atmosphere and colour compositions.
To end the video of my week is this awesome short animation "I'm a monster" by Headless Productions
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