After the trip to York at the beginning
of the week the whole Pudding Lane Productions team was almost ready
to burst with ideas. The twisting, narrow lanes in the centre of
York, especially The Shambles at its heart with its overhanging
timber-framed buildings sheltering the cobbled street below meant the
group began week five with lots of new ideas and inspiration. One of
the main points I think we all took away from visiting York, is that
we got a real sense of just how tightly packed the streets of 17
th
Century London would have been, at some points on The Shambles street
you could literally outstretch you arms and touch the buildings on
opposite sides of the street, the tops of buildings were actually
inches from touching.
The following day we had our first team
meeting of the week in which we had our first chance to share and
talk about the work we had done in week four, we were able to discuss
various items including how the work could be taken further as well
as any improvements that could be made. I (Joe Dempsey) was also able
to provide Luc Fontenoy our technical artist, who we also call our
'Cry Guy'! with the initial assets I had modelled for church grounds
so that he could begin to import them into the CryENGINE in the week
and provide feedback accordingly. Dan Hargreaves had taken his
modular buildings much further adding smaller details, Dom Bell
similarly had worked further on his prop assets. Chelsea Lindsay and
Dan Peacock demonstrated some of the textures and concepts they had
been working on.
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| Preliminary texture sheet composed by Dan Peacock |
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| Small tomb asset for Church Grounds, Joe Dempsey |
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| Modular Church wall assets for Church Grounds, Joe Dempsey |
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| Dan Hargreaves showing the potential variety from his modular buildings |
After concluding any unfinished
details/ issues from the previous week the group then went on to
discuss our ideas for tasks to be carried out during week five. We
now had a good bulk of the map laid out in CryENGINE using our
initial modular buildings and other assets and with the inspiration
and ideas gathered from the York trip we all felt we could go back to
the map and begin concepting the individual streets including and
surrounding Pudding Lane. There are a number of reasons behind our
decision to do this, earlier in the week our technical artist Luc
Fontenoy had talked about potentially colour grading different areas
of the map within CryENGINE coinciding with the teams initial
decision outlined in the Art Guide Document describing how we planned
to give each area of the map its own individual colour scheme to add
variety and to avoid everything looking too similar. To do this we
decided that we would nominate a selection of streets, one for each
member of the team. The streets selected are shown below;
Fish
Street Hill – Chelsea Lindsay
Pudding Lane – Joe Dempsey
Botolph Lane – Dan Peacock
Love Lane – Dan Hargreaves
Thames Street - Luc Fontenoy
Crooked Lane – Dom Bell
Luc Fontenoy would provide the group
with screen shots of the individual streets from the whitebox at its
current stage with which the group could then compose a variety of
colour grading/ mood paintings using the Art Guide as a continuous
source of reference for the specific colour schemes. At this stage
Luc was uncertain on how to apply colour grading correctly to the
level, but during the week he has had the opportunity to discuss this
as well as other items with an ex DMU Game Art Student who has a good
knowledge of the CryENGINE enabling him and the rest of the group to
further expand their knowledge of the engine to ensure things are
being done correctly at this stage in the project.
Below are some of the screenshots taken directly from CryENGINE Luc was able to provide the group;
Below are examples of the concepts
completed this week by some of the group;
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| Concept of Fish Street Hill by Chelsea Lindsay, showing colour scheme and street assets |
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| Colour grading watercolour studies for Pudding Lane by Joe Dempsey, Joe decided to use watercolours to help demonstrate the sense of atmosphere the group hope to achieve |
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| Concept of Pudding Lane by Joe Dempsey, showing potential colour palette using watercolour |
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| Concept of Pudding Lane by Joe Dempsey, showing potential colour palette using watercolour |
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| Concept of Pudding Lane by Joe Dempsey, showing potential colour palette using watercolour |
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| Concept of Pudding Lane by Joe Dempsey, showing potential colour palette using watercolour |
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| Concept of Botolph Lane by Dan Peacock |
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Concept of Botolph Lane by Dan Peacock, showing the griminess and plague ridden street
Concept of Thames Street by Luc Fontenoy |
We also discussed continuing to develop
ideas in relation to ensuring uniqueness within the individual street
concepts as the next stage, including points of interest on the
streets such as unique taverns, tailors, butcher shops, fishmongers,
grocers etc. and of course The Kings Baker house, Farriner's Bakery
on Pudding Lane. This would also mean that the group would again have
to look back into some historical reference in order to gain an idea
of certain specific buildings on the individual streets to maintain
the level of historical accuracy the group hopes to achieve within
the project, one source of reference suggested for this included the
diary of Samuel Pepys in which he describes visiting specific places
and buildings, including names of things such as Taverns during the
17th Century. The group would also like to begin looking
into smaller assets/ props to clutter the streets, again some unique
to specific streets, others such as crates, sacks, barrels, carts,
hay bales etc. could be used throughout the level as well as being
used to close certain streets off when the group have decided on a
final perimeter. Right now this was less of a priority.
Below are some examples of individual
buildings, P.O.I., concepts completed by some of the group;
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| Concept of The Sunne Tavern for Fish Street Hill by Chelsea Lindsay |
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| Concept of The King's Head Tavern for Fish Street Hill by Chelsea Lindsay |
During the meeting Dan Hargreaves was
given the task of completing some preliminary terrain textures also.
Dan has a good knowledge of ZBrush and was confident that he could
complete a good tillable texture with reference gathered from the
York trip. They are shown below;
Luc Fontenoy also continued to develop
his modular church buildings which are shown below;
Again at the end of the week we were
able to have a meeting with our head of studies, Mike, and what we
like to think of as our Producer. These meetings give the group the
opportunity to discuss with Mike the work carried out that week, the
ideas from the week and the direction the group wishes to take into
the following week. The meeting was again positive and highly
constructive and the group mainly talked about their weeks work each
in turn giving any appropriate feedback. One of the main points of
feedback from the meeting was the fact that after Luc's unbelievable
hard work building a large amount of the level whitebox to
demonstrate to Mike during this meeting, Mike suggested that the
actual streets appeared to be quite long and we conversed that we
could incorporate smaller alleyways in-between buildings to add more
connections between streets, enabling the player to move from street
to street quicker and easier enabling us to keep the player engaged
with the level. Some reference photographs taken in York shown below
give an example of what these alleyways could potentially look like;
In our first meeting of the week we
also talked about starting to look into texturing and what textures
would need to be applied and where. At the very end of the week the
group got into a lengthy discussion on specific material Id’s for
texturing the modular building assets. Nothing specific was decided
but we did begin to compile ideas for texturing including beginning
to compose a variety of re-usable textures, tillable textures etc.
the layout of UV's and again we all gave our own opinions on how the
modular buildings should be textured in relation to the number of
material Id’s within their multi sub materials. Below is a
suggestion from Chelsea Lindsay, team leader, for a texture/ material
ID plan in order to make the discussion clearer. It was decided that
we would be able to use this to continue discussing our ideas in our
first week six meeting to come to a final decision which would enable
to team to begin composing their high quality textures beginning week
six.
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