Concepts at last!

Over the course of the last few weeks, I've found that I've fallen into the trap of focusing too closely on the research aspect of honours, and less on the concept development. I think this is partly due to my still widening understanding of how to implement the lighting techniques, colour associations and such that I have been looking into, in order to achieve my aims, as well as more fundamentally to what mine and Fraser's project will actually look like. However I have been meeting a lot more regularly with Fraser since crit week to discuss the creative artifact and what we want in it. I have begun to feel quite happy that we have the foundations for a solid idea, and I finally began concepting some ideas!

In collaboration with Fraser we quickly created this environment in UDK using the BSP brushes and some default models/textures, in order to get a rough feel of the entrance room to the villa. His contribution was the purely that of the level design, whereas mine was aimed at the light (including window placement) and to an extent the colour, but using existing UDK textures for quickness limited this somewhat. (The image outside the windows was quickly added in photoshop just to avoid a black backdrop). Doing this gave me the importunity to see the lighting tools in UDK, which appear to consist of mainly just point lights, ambient light and directional light. I suppose this makes sense as light travels in all directions, so spotlights like those in maya are only logical if there is an actual model capable of creating such a light with its shape and a light placed inside.

It is a very rough representation, there is still a lot of work needed on the lighting (generally making the room appear brighter), as well as changing the colours to suit the mood (open, inviting, natural). I plan to take the image into photoshop to continue it from there, but this UDK scene should come in handy for a base to work from when implementing the models.

The next step is to do the same for each of the room ideas I have.

We also spent some time playing around with Speed-Tree in UDK, deciding that to save a lot of time we should probably use that to create the organic assets used in the garden. Unfortunately I didn't think to take a screenshot of any of our tests, because I'm silly at times.