Rising Star 2018 - Sci-fi Armory

Introduction:

When I started this project, I knew straight away I wanted to produce a piece that was going to include some sort of weaponry or machinery. Upon brainstorming I considered a lot of themes but the one I settled on was Science-Fiction as I personally love the genre and play a lot of games from it. When researching into possible influences and references I looked extensively at games like Planetside 2, Angels Fall First, Mass Effect as well as other movies and media productions that are from the sci-fi genre. In the end I decided to look more at Planetside 2 in terms of surface detail, theme and atmosphere (I was looking to combine the art styles of the Vanu Sovereignty and New Conglomerate from the game). This meant I had the freedom to produce an environment that has stylized realism as its art style, as well as a lot of wear and tear going into  its metalwork. So I looked at both other games and real life to see how they would put scratches, rust, dust and other grunges into an environment. In terms of production I am hoping to use a professional pipe-line and I am aim to work towards a professional standard. I have set the limit of tris in my scene to 50,000 tris, and the texture space is 2048x2048 on most individual assets, and 4k on texture sheets which encompass a lot of assets within the scene. I will be using this project to also practice my skills within Substance Painter, and will be using Photoshop as more of a small editing tool, or photo-bashing program. I want this scene to have the atmosphere that most sci-fi settings do - cold and dark, which is why I want to go for a cold colour palette for most of my lighting and textures as this will boost such an atmosphere. The story I wish to tell is one of a well-worn room where military-grade materials and weaponry is created, stored, inspected and transported away.

Conclusion:

Overall I think my project was successful in creating both an atmosphere and a narrative, however I do believe there are areas that could benefit from a lot of improvement for the next project. Next time I would definitely allocate more time to conceptual development as that lacked within this project, and although I iterated my designs within 3D software, I do wonder how much time I could have saved if I had conceptually designed the assets to a higher standard. The other area I believe I could of improved on is texturing - its true that I probably wouldn't of had textures that were anywhere near as good if I didn't use substance painter - but I do feel like I would of liked to have put 3-4 more iterations of textures into this project. Regardless, I believe that my optimized texture sheets and models are to a good standard, and I will continually seek better ways to optimize, and next time I hope to research more extensively into post-processing to make sure I'm maximizing the visual quality of my environment. In conclusion, this project has taught me a lot of key principles when it comes to designing an environment and the time-scale in which you need to create it, I hope the valuable experience I've learnt from this project will carry through into my next as I create something even more grand! 

Sketchfab links (in case sketchbook links don't work!): 

key asset - https://skfb.ly/6w6p8

Architecture - https://skfb.ly/6w6pv

Large Deco - https://skfb.ly/6w6pB

Supporting Prop - https://skfb.ly/6w6pJ