spaceenvirodocumentation

[spaceenvirodocumentation]

Final Thoughts

So... that’s pretty much everything. I’ve attached the video again to this post so that it’s easier to get to, and there will be a couple of renders of the final scene below as well.

This was a pretty fun project to work on, and to be honest, it turned out way better than I thought it would. There were definitely some moments where I was worried that this was going to crash and burn, most notably when I realized I was going to have to throw out the initial ship model and rebuild it from scratch, considering I had spend about 10 hours on it at that point, but it all worked out okay in the end! I feel like I learned a lot from this, especially when it comes to navigating Blender. I feel much more comfortable using the program now than I did when I started.

[spaceenvirodocumentation]

Devlog 006: What I Did Part 3

When I finished up the models for the space ships, I set up their uv’s for texturing and then made some simple textures for them in substance painter, using the color references I made way back in the first devlog.

After that, I also made some simple asteroids in Blender, since the placeholders I had been using from the Unreal marketplace weren’t models that I wanted to keep in the final scene.

I set them up in Unreal, and added some lights to the back of the space ships to make it look like they had active engines.

However, as you can see, the scene looks... very sparse. I had set up the asteroids to loop in order to make it seem like there was an infinite amount of them, and while that worked from the original camera angle I had used since you couldn’t see them teleport back to their starting position, it became extremely obvious from any other angle.

I was unfortunately starting to get pretty close to the deadline, so I had to take the crude approach: Copy and paste the asteroids. A lot.

...Yeah. It got the job done in the end, but if I had more time, I definitely would have found a more elegant solution to the issue. Unfortunately, deadlines were close, so I really only had time to set it up like this is I wanted to have an actual particle system for the ship engines in order to make them look a little better.

I used Niagara to make some simple engine thrust particles, and it was a bit tricky, considering I don’t have much experience with creating particles. I like how they came out in the end, and they looked much better than the simple lights I had been using before.

[spaceenvirodocumentation]

Devlog 005: What I Did Part 2

The next thing I did was set up to ships to animate. I had taken this step between modeling the first ship, and used the version i eventually threw out as a placeholder to see if the scale was alright. It was for the most part, but I could tell that the guns in particular would have to be resized, as they were much too small.

As you can see in the video, the movement was... not amazing. I had gotten them to bob and weave somewhat, but there were some orientation issues that were making them pitch at weird angles that had to be worked out. I also noted that the lighting needed to be touched up on a little bit.

[spaceenvirodocumentation]

Devlog 004: What I Did Part 1

So, to recap from last time, as you can see in the video above, I had gotten some placeholders in place and made the asteroids move across the screen to simulate the ships being the ones flying through space.

After that, I set up the skybox to actually reflect outer space, using the GoodSky bp on the unreal marketplace to achieve this.

After that, I moved on to modeling the actual ship models so they could be textured and placed in the scene.

This actually took far longer than I was expecting, mostly because my first attempt didn’t go so well, and I had to start over. The end results however, turned out pretty good in my opinion!

[spaceenvirodocumentation]

Devlog 003: So I Went and Finished the Entire Project

So... the title of this one is pretty much what happened. To make a long story short, I ended up getting so busy that I ended up not having much time to keep up with this devlog. If there’s one thing I can say I learned, is that you should try to avoid putting too much on your plate so you can keep up with things you need to do.

But anyways, I did finish this entire project, and you can a video of the finished product above.

I did keep documentation thought, and I’ll be posting that in a separate post so you can look at it!

[spaceenvirodocumentation]

Devlog 002: Double Feature

Hi!

So, I know I said I was going to post last week, but the 2022 gamejam happened, and I ended up putting a lot of my time and energy into preparing for and participating in it. As such, I didn’t get much work done. I did, however, get plenty done this week!

The first thing I did was refine the two ship ref sheets and gave them some color.

Progress has also started on the model for the “player” ship.

Another thing I managed to do is create some moving asteroids for the scenes. I downloaded some free assets from the unreal marketplace and am using them as placeholders for now, but I set them up to move across the screen.

Next week (for sure this time) will be more progress on the ships, and hopefully, one will be fully modeled and textured.

[spaceenvirodocumentation]

Devlog 001: Introduction

Hello! This post is the first in a series of posts that will be tracking the development of a 3D environment project I am undertaking. The plan is to create a sci-fi scene of two spaceships fighting in an asteroid field.

When I started, I had a general idea of what I wanted, which was the aforementioned dogfight, but I didn’t know how I wanted the “shot” to be depicted, so I sketched out an very rough idea to start with:

After that, I refined the sketch a little bit, changing the angle slightly and adding a second ship to the scene:

I like the layout of how this sketch looked, but I still needed to decide what the two ships were going to actually look like. So I started doing a little research into various spaceships and space planes.

For the ship closest to the “camera”, I wanted something with gentle curves and a look somewhat like an airplane, and ended up creating something of a fusion between the two space planes on the top, and well as taking the extra engines from some of the space shuttle concepts.

For the second ship, the “enemy”, I wanted sometime sharper, more aggressive. I looked at some dual hulled ships and planes for inspiration, as well as two ships from the video game WipEout for shape inspiration on making something that was made to be quick and combative.

From there, I got this design:

So, now I had designs hashed out shape-wise, but I still needed to blockout a scene to build. I decided to build a blockout in Unreal Engine, as I’m most familiar with that program.

That’s all for this first log! Next, I’ll start modeling to two ships in Maya.