First Week of Project Steel

Hello! and welcome back to my blog! For around 10 weeks I will be posting a weekly blog post talking about what have been working on during that week for the development process of the game Project Steel (WIP).  My role in the project is Lead 3d artist.

This week was our first real week of production. We got a greenlight on Monday and got our office on Tuesday. Most of the time on Tuesday went to fixing our office space as well as getting the screen and things that we needed from Finn.

Then on Wednesday we started the project for real. We had a more serious scrum meeting where we plan what people were going to be working on during the week.

I sat down with the other 3d artist in the group and tried to plan what had to be done and what deadlines each thing was going to have. We plan as long as to the Alpha witch is on the 28^th of April.

The next step was to start working on what had to be done this week.

I was going to start working on the first pod or vehicle that was going to be used in the first playable version of the game. I had to draw some sort of concept witch then had to be approved by the Game designer. Then make a Highpoly model witch would be used for baking out textures for the model witch would be used in the game at the end.

My first thought about how to get the concept done was to make some sort of fast sketch model in 3d done witch I could show the game designer called Cheese. I thought that this way might have been the fastest and easiest because I don’t have that much of skill in drawing. This turned out not work that well not only because it did take longer time then if I would have tried drawing at least something out, but also because I had didn’t have anything to go on, I had no real idea or feeling of what Cheese wanted the pods to look like. What I did then was to push Cheese in to making some sort of Mood board witch I could follow to get some sort of pod design.

While he was working on getting a mood board for the design of the pods me and the other 3d artist named Seamus went and gather pictures of different spaceships, cars, race cars, airplanes ex that we could use to help us in the design process.

Finaly we got the moodboard and we started to get a broad understanding of what Cheese wanted the pods to look like. So I sat down in Photoshop and tried to get some sort of sketch down on how the first pod was going to look.

This is the final conecpt sketch of the pods overall look.

I drew 4 different ideas on the overall form of the pods and sent them to Cheese to get feedback and witch one he liked the most. He liked the 4^th one the most but asked about a bit more details on how the pod was going to look. I told him I was going to add some pipes and cords and some broken pieces of metal so that it became more like the idea he had in his head. He liked it and I moved on to the next step. The highpoly

Now when I had the overall form of the pod and a somewhat idea on how I wanted the pod to look so I started on the Highpoly. I decided to work in a new program witch I had not worked a lot in before but from what I had tried of it and seen it was a good program for hard surface highpoly modeling. I stayed late in the office to try to understand the program better so I could start working in it the next day. The program is working rather well and I quickly understood how to work in it though I still have a hard time to find fixes of issues that I would know how to fix in another 3d program. It didn’t take long before I had the base of the highpoly ready and then could start working on more details like cords, broken metal pieces, and so on. I ran into more problem here witch was that I was not 100% sure what I wanted to do with the details. This was mostly because I did not have a solid concept witch I was following.

this is how the model looked before i went into Photoshop to sketch over it.

After some wasted time of trying and failing and not really getting anywhere with how the detailing was supposed to be, I rendered out a picture of the pod and sketched over it on how I wanted the details to be. This was also the end of the week and on Monday I plan on getting the details done so I can start working on the low poly model.

I hope that I explain the process and the thought process well and if you have any questions or anything you are wondering about please feel free to comment and I will try to give you and answer!

Regards Simon Strandh