Gart230 Blog- Week four, Refining the block-out

This week I decided to focus on refining the block out I made last week so that it more closely matched the reference images and moved away from basic geometry. As mentioned in the last blog post I made the massage room and steam room a priority and I also decided to focus more acutely on the central pillars of the room as these were one of the most striking design features of the environment and are shown clearly in the film. The first thing I focused on this week was scaling the whole scene to a more accurate level as thus far I had been modelling only to the floorplan and thus when I imported the UE4 man asset provided to us for the purposes of scaling in last years project the objects were significantly smaller than they needed to be, this was a simple fix as I realised that the grid settings I was using had each unit 10x smaller than I needed them to be meaning that it was an easy fix to adjust all objects size tenfold and then change the grid settings within Maya. The pillars were fairly simple to model to a slightly higher level of detail and as they remain consistent through most of the reference images it was simple to find good references for almost all angles.

The steam room and massage rooms were significantly harder as they are both glazed boxes essentially but on the outside there are no visible separations between the different panels of glass there is instead an internal metal frame to which the glass is mounted. I attempted multiple ways of modelling these buildings, initially trying to model the frame first and then placing the glass panels on top but it was very hard to create the virtually seamless exterior this way and if I started by modelling the glass panels themselves it became very fiddly to line up the frame with all the different panels. I finally settled on creating both objects simultaneously by creating two cubes of identical proportions with identical edge loops where the different glass panels were, I then extruded and slightly offset the outside faces of one of the cubes to create the almost imperceptible seams in the glass, I then deleted the surrounding faces leaving only the central glass panels. On the the other cube I started off similarly by extruding and offsetting each face although I offset these faces to a slightly greater degree to make the frame slightly thicker than the gaps in the glass panels I then deleted the centre of each face leaving only the frame of the room on one cube and the panels on another. Both perfectly scaled a lined up with one another. I also started to experiment with placing water into the scene although instead of creating transparent/translucent water at this stage I settled on placing a plane into the scene with a basic opaque water texture onto it as this will help me gauge what will be above and below the waterline as well as get a slightly better understanding of how the final scene will look without getting ahead of myself and sinking a lot of time into creating a good looking water texture at this stage when I need to be more focused on the models themselves. Another asset that posed a significant challenge was the curtains at both ends of the room, I Initially attempted to model the curtains using nurbs but couldn’t get a satisfactory result so instead moved onto N-cloth simulations which proved a lot more succesful altoutgh did pose quite a steep learning curve which I was only really able to overcome thanks to this very helpful tutorial on YouTube (Maya 2016 tutorial : How to export an nCloth object ( FBX ) – YouTube). Over the next week I hope to export all the models as FBX files and move the whole scene across into unreal engine to double check scaling and to have a first shot at lighting the scene.