Featured image of post The Orbital Gateway - 02 - Blockout and Splines

The Orbital Gateway - 02 - Blockout and Splines

Initial space blockout

Greybox

Hey everyone,

First project update from me. Here is some progress from the past 3 days.

UE4 screenshot. Large, gray cylinder with gateway-like cuts. Inside the cuts are overpowering, blue emissive cards. Around are long, straight pipes and metal platforms that go outwards of the platform in all directions like chains.

I’ve been mainly blocking out the space and making sure the scale and placement is correct. Not many details yet, but there will be time for that later on.

First thing I did the other day when I started was to block out some rough shapes directly in Unreal using the basic Brushes. Instead of dragging the shapes around, I used the settings tab and put in specific values for the size of each thing. What I had at the end of that day was pretty meh visually, but it was important that I had some numbers and measurements figured out.

The next day, I went in Maya where I started the proper geometry, again using the values I had picked in the Brushes. After making few of my static meshes, I put them into Unreal with a gray, placeholder materials. I then experimented a bit more with fog and light and had a scene that looked a bit better.

Progress Gif

I’ll keep my tradition I started back a few challenges ago (with the Feudal Japan one) and export some progress GIFs and animations in some of my blog updates. Here is one:

Gif timelapse that slowly shows up the build up of the blockout from an empty scene with default Unreal 4 sky to what is depicted in the screenshot above.

Today I mainly created some of the shapes on the cylindrical room, as seen in the background.

Splines

The pipes, by the way, are made by a small cut section of a mesh I modeled in Maya that was then used in a custom Spline tool I created in Unreal. That enabled me to easily create all of the different shaped pipes you see. I need to bake them into proper geometry later on, as they are just non static Blueprints right now and that will cause issues with lighting later on when I start baking lights, but for now though, it will do.

I hope everyone else is having fun with their scenes.

Until next time,

Pete.

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