finishing touches

 now ive come to the end of the project i started grabbing  all my high resolution textures and reducing them to the texture budget and i found that if i wanted i could use reduced some of my smaller less important textures and use more unique texture sheets so i assessed my map and really dint like metal textures on the crane and i think instead of using copy's of the textures and minuplating the nodes for the textures i could make three smaller better detailed textures because i find using nodes blurs the texture and almost white washes it when you change colour. 

 i also so put some more focus in to the background by using blocks of parts and skyscraper building parts to but far back in the fog so you can see a sort of city skyline. and i also duplicated the crane because was one of my original ideas a city scape in construction not just one building.

 i also went in a tried to put some more detail that was relative to the player in size  and playing with nodes because some of my specular and bump maps were looking to detailed an noisy and some thinks like wood were to bumped and came to far offset so using lurp nodes i managed to get a more realistic look.

lighting

for my base lighting my main directional light i wanted it to come from the moon and maybe even animate it depending on time so i carried on using my nodes for my sky box and built a sun an edited it until it look like a moon a grey an blue moon with low level detail because there's clouds that cover it most of the time. which so far i think is giving some really interesting dynamic shadows bouncing of my pillars and crane especially i placed my sun above the crane so that i can get some good metal silhouette shadows.

but all my assets have little lighting and is lucking very dull so i started playing around with directional lights and point lights out of my flood lamps but the problem is they just show the light on the floor which inst what a flood lambs look like you can see big rays from flood lambs which also cast quite nice sharp shadows. so i played around with a few different ways but the only way i could get it to work was using cone meshes as the light and using alphas to show the light fading away.

which gives it a much sharper out come know i just need to scatter them about and play with the angles to get some dynamic shadows.

 now ive placed the flood maps after a quick assessment and from feedback i think that my level for a night scene is still abit dark so i need to tweak the sky dome and moon. i think the clouds are abit to bright for a night scene and need to be allot darker or near to no clouds and i need to bump up my star's. i now need to start thinking about the  surrounding environment and low Polly sky scene i think im going to use bit from my meshes to make some skyscrapers and maybe some low Polly building blocks if my texture budget will allow it i might just have some really low Polly building an low resolution textures. 

final week

have now reached my final week of the rooftop project iv got allot to do but not an unrealistic amount in 5 days, this week my mane focus is to finish bits and pieces of and then focus on lighting the level and play through lots of tweaking, and making sure everything fits the brief  i manged to fix my elevator by fixing collision and editing it  so that it was more like an open elevator so you can see round the level as you rise otherwise id of had to make an elevator that closed round the player and ide of to animated in parts and think this way gives a more dynamic view of the map when you spawn and saves on texture space as im using instances of my textures. 

 editing fog so that im getting some light shafts dropping down from the crane which hopefully when i make a revolving moon the lighting will look realistic and also cranes have little spotlights  along the crane to help the player along the map. 

after playing around with the mist setting so that the player doesn't spawn in complete fog i moved on to making my sky box my idea is a night scene so will have lots of man made lighting  i wanted a dark cloudy night with starts above so i took photos in the day and edited them and added in star's for the main texture and for the moving clouds i played around with mask's and brushes did i got something that i liked and felt that goes well with the amount of fog i want in my map .

iv also started building ways to get up onto the crane i also built some ladders  so you can get to the controls of my crane. also have made the rope hook climbable to make the map more fun and give it options of how you would like to play through the level.

assets updates and interactive elements 

less than two weeks left of the project now and i really need to fill out the map with last of assets on every floor i also need to begin blocking parts of my map of from the player to push him round the staircases.

i modeled some cement bags because its assets i can easily duplicated to fill out my level and then and cement mixer but i don't want to use that mesh to much as it more unique but will make the map look very samey if there two many.

 i also made some flood lights because at the moment i have no source of light other than the sun and as i want it to be a night scene i need some lights and i wanted fog lights because i think it will add  more interactivity to the level and look more realistic and less flat. 

today my main goal was to finish all my meshes apart from little details i can add with later. so far iv reached a tri count in my scene 17,283 which is allot better than i originally thought because allot of my level is very modular set up so i thought i would have small tri count but i think i underestimated my crane count and because iv modeling so high i need to make sure that ill be able to climb up there either through jumping up on to the swinging crane lever or i could make a platform from the top floor that could connect you to the top. 

 today i have manged to rig my crane to swing back and forth which was allot easier to do than i expected i just took the opening door tutorial and changed it for my crane and put my trigger at the start of the level so as soon as you press play it will start to move  slowly to keep it realistic.

my plan is to start of in the elevator with a spawn point and a trigger to start and make the elevator go up to the first floor and then you get out and explore my level but the problem im having at the moments is moving my elevator its straight forward enough to get you from the bottom floor to the top, but the way ive built is that its a walk in elevator the way to make a mesh move you have to change a collision to block all which wont let me get in iv tried playing with different setting but all i get is no collision so you fall of the map and block collision with no access, so this is what i really need to sort out or find another alternative to having my elevator like a platform with a cage like an window washers skyscraper lifts. 

crane update

my crane seems to be coming along nicely iv almost finished it now at the moment thought i don't the think  the crane is long enough and doesn't very realistic because its so tall would seem strange to be so short width ways so i lengthened the mesh and since i used unwrapped one i could just move along the cross pieces to fill the gap quite easily.

 i detailed out the crane some more to fill out more and give it a better silhouette from the top down view because i thought it was also looking a bit flat, and also gave a control box and the hook, that i might use as a climbing point in the game so the player could access the crane if he wanted to. but as the crane metal is using a tillable texture im going to use a multi sub object for the details of the crane. 

im also going to use instances of my metal texture for the crane with color parameters to save more texture sheets for my assets that i need to fill out the map, im using one metal texture with a red instance and yellow to make up the crane textures.  

 but at the moment my crane color are flattening the texture maps abit so i need adjust the nodes with multiply and such to get more realistic and detailed texture. 

level layout and play-though 

for a while ive been thinking that the layout of my level needs tweaking so i started to asses my level so far and i realized i had made the mistake that it wasent impossible to access the third floor of my level, because for some reason i have missed out a step in my construction stairs. and i dint like how you could just miss out a huge chunk of level by just walking up to the third floor so instead of just adding more flights of stairs i enlarged the ground floor added a flight of stairs on the other side. that take you to the top to floors so i can have some assets blocking out the middle of my floors and push the player round all the floors which will also make my level seem allot longer and more to play through.

which i think is much better way to move through the map and will make my map allot more interesting i also need to think about ways to close of certain parts of the stairwell.

crane play-through

my main job today is to start my crane and maybe the base for my elevator i though about building the crane in a few different ways but i think the way its built modular assets would work well, especially for the base parts which wont be moving for the main bit of the crane that will be rotating im going to use ids and mix between already made tillable textures and unique low textures for the smaller bits like the controls system and the actual dolly lift. 

i just modeled one block of the base and used instance's and build the big rotating crane separatly i want to keep the rotating meshes all attached because i think it will make it easier for me when trying figure out how to make things move in my level

now i have fleshed out my map im starting to think about ways to go through my map and i now have made some of the crane and my thought was instead of having a low Polly crane and spawning in the elevator i could make the task to get to the elevator like a robbery stealth mission it sound a bit out there but i like the idea of modeling a parachute hanging of the end of the crane as if you would parachuted in a stealth mission and landed on the crane. because i think ide find it very hard in my time frame to build a way to get up the crane i don't know the purpose of the game would be to get up there would be maybe a sniper point but i like my idea better because i think its possible more original . 

so i tried to come up with a few variation of ways to move through my map so not just to get stuck with one idea.  

asset building 

at the moment my level is very empty and my main priority is filling it with asset's focusing on how to play through the map i started with the most important big assets like my boarded stairs and scaffolds at the moment i am working on the big assets like big pipes and planks because they can brake up the level the easiest but cant be duplicated as much.  i want to using mainly tilling texture as much as possible because we don't have the biggest texture budget and i know need the space more down the line for my texture, and if i use my textures sparingly ill have more detail i can vertex paint or alpha in to make my textures more diverse and unique later , for my textures want a good mix of clean textures and dirty because it is as construction site so all the assets that they would be building with would be new and clean but the raw elements that you wont see of the building like piping and wood can be dirty because there in a busy workplace and wouldn't be seen in the finished version of the skyscraper.

remembering also when texturing that all the concrete is exposed to the elements so there would be wet mold and rust on the cracks and corners of my asset's

my rooftop was very empty and looks very dangerous to work on as you could just walk of the map so i built big boards to enclose the rooftop so it looks more real stick that people would be working on there . also iv began the start of my texturing that i need to do as i go to make sure i am working efficiently and i need to remember when texturing the impression of people working on the site like dent and dirt, footprints and maybe sandwich boxes for the workers .

using modular assets and tillable textures i manged to fill my level out so its not as bare ,there's still allot of assets yet to be built but it definitely looks allot better with abit of business  using prefabs i scattered these the assets about in preliminary positions for today.  

initial asset list 

wooden planks                 thick wooden blocks                 cement bags
concrete blocks                 concrete bricks                       concrete floors
scaffolding tables               thin pipes                                  large pipes
safety boards                       crates                                        tarpaulin                                                           bucket                             cement mixer                                 crane 
elevator                             fog lights                                   skyscraper base
beams                                 sheep metals  

blitz rooftop

initial ideas and research 

my first thought was to a rooftop based around a water tower, a very suburban rooftop with graffiti and grime everywhere and maybe , even a skate ramp or two. because i thought it would be quite different from what allot of people would be doing. 

so i started my design progress and gathered lots of reference of water towers trying to think about different layouts and silhouettes. once i had a rough idea of what i wanted to do i started some thumbnail with white boxes

 focusing on shape and trying to put lots of cover into the level i tried out a sort of pent house sweet rooftop and with an aligning building with water towers and generators on it, which i think looks interesting but abit to small for my rooftop and not enough going on in comparison.  

 i manged to narrow it down to one of my original thumbnails which i think is more dynamic from every angle and adds some more intersting  height to the level rather than on a similar plane. and some advertisement on billboards could be interesting. 

i think if i make the player spawn on the pink balcony out of a door could be interesting to push the player up the map and see more of a range of the map then starting at the top on a similar height so you can see the whole level as soon as you spawn which i don't think would be as interesting to play through.

i spent a day working through idea and after sleeping onit and reading through the brief some more i think i can do a better idea that's fits it better because i don't think at the moment the interactive assets would be very interesting and don't make my level very fun to play through .so back to brain storming i came up with the idea of a construction site.

  i think with this idea i could do more interactive elements like and elevator that goes up the side of the building for the start point and a big crane over above to bring some life to the scene. 

 so starting the design process again i came up with there be more work than the previous idea but i really want to push my self on this project as what i can achieve. the block out is alot simpler but i think for the actual mesh when it is all built with stairs to every floor it will be more interesting. 

after a quick assessment i need the building block's of the level to be more interesting so i changed the shape of the sky scrapper to be more aesthetically pleasing. my plan is to use alot of modular assets to bulk out the level so i can focus alot on the crane my only worry is that ill have to many tries unused and not be able to get upto the budget because all my meshes on the construction site are very boxes in essence and don't have very high levels of detail. at the moment the level is looking very repetitive but hopefully once i start getting some assets spread about it will look allot better.

my plan for the surrounding environment is to be low down buildings in the backdrop and maybe a duplicated crane in the distance i want there to be enough fog around the base of the level so it look like it just keeps going down so i don't have to worry to much about the bottom of the level ,and to show the height of the level.

my initial concept piece to give me a quick feel of what i want it to look like and to give me an over view of how many assets i need to build to really fill this map out i really want to do a night scene and have some fog lights darted about also to help guide the player  through the interesting bits of my level and to hide the lesser.