Final Video and Review

Final walk through of Dorian's House for submission:

http://www.screenr.com/9YxN

And a final breakdown:

- Overall, I'm not happy with the final product. I chalk it up to two things; not enough time, and not enough skill. If I were more skilled maybe time wouldn't have been a factor, but I was trying to find as many shortcuts during modelling as I could, just to save some time.

- Of course that didn't work in my favour. Most models were broken, duplicate faces, and backwards normals. It took a long time sorting through all the pieces. I also modelled it all in one maya file, then split all the objects (this is why there are slits in doors and sides). I thought it be possible to import them all in in one go, but again, a shortcut that turned into a nightmare.

- The engine. I'd used UDK before, so I wasn't sure why it wasn't working this time. I think my models were too broken. I switched to Unity, and was lucky to be shown the basics to controllers and importing from my designer. This ate more precious time too.

- The visuals. I'd planned to paint all the textures of the house myself in Photoshop. But I hardly got to do any of them. They're mostly pulled from Google and just feel disappointing. They don't mesh with my original idea/colour pallet at all.

- Lighting. I've never done any lighting in engine before, but I couldn't get the atmosphere right on this. I think this might be due to the texture settings; all of them are on mobile > diffuse.

- No Interactive Pieces. I wanted to code picking up a key/unlocking a door...

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On the plus side however...I am happy I have a final piece. I was worried the model would be too broken to function. Similarly, I'm happy that my original plan to show narrative through spactial area has turned out. Every room has an item that leads up the inevitable ending of the book (the blue book corridor, Basil's hat in library, Dorian discovers the Les Cent Nouvelles towards the game that eventually leads to (besides Basil's death) Dorian's suicide and the portraits glory restored in the attic.

There's alot of visuals I'd redo if I had the time for it, but am over all happy with the spatial construct and walk path of the house.

Feel free to give any thoughts to the project. Thank you.

- Ceren

Complete!

Sorry for the silence here; 2nd semester is always the busiest. I've spent my last few weeks getting Dorian's house together on Unity. I won't lie, for a long time I thought it wouldn't work. I've learnt a valuable lesson; do everything right from the start, or you have to go back and fix every asset again one at a time. When I write my final blog post with learning outcomes, pros and cons, I'll summarize everything. For now, the house model!

Next job is to fix the books for bookshelf, paint the portrait of Dorian, and take video of me playing the game. The video will focus on the interactivity. More specifically, the route/layout of the house playing the narrative, and the items found along the way to aid that...

Slightly Broken.

My main things to do now are; seperate the house pieces, and texture them all appropriately. It's been about a week now that I'm trying to clean up this broken mesh.

Turns out I've some how got face upon face upon face duplicates...I delete and they keep going!

This update sounds like an awful rant, but in honesty this mesh is very broken and slowing down my overall progress to focus on more important things. Next update should hopefully be better. :)

Nope, it's Unity time!

I've abandoned UDK, it's just being a mess. Besides, I've used Unity to create a side scrolling game, but never incorporated 3D into it, so I'd like to try it out. I've luckily got a friend who's helped me figure out the collision and playable character elements too! Excuse that my character is tiny and that the lights are just shoved in to see where I'm walking:

But it's more progress than UDK was giving me. So it's time to move back to Maya, and start cleaning up the mesh and texturing all of the elements...eeep.

UDK time!

...It's not going so well, I'm not sure why. Got afew friends helping, and I've done this before, but for some reason it's coming out very...broken:

To be fair, this screenshot doesn't show how messed up the last upload was. The bookcase was mangelled. It looked cool, but it's not what I'm trying to do, sadly.

I've avoided UDKing so far, but thought I'd check my mesh at least works alittle bit before I start splitting it up for textures etc. Not sure where to go from here...

Final House Layout/Model

It's done! This is it in Maya:

I now need to cut it up, UVing, texturing and start importing it into UDK. Ouch! So much to do!

1890's

Victorian Houses in London were built during the reign of Queen Victoria (1837 - 1901)

Already posted a similar moodboard, but wanted to stick this up too, it helped me during concept art-ing. Also love the wee tophat on the sofas arm; reminded me about Basil Howard's hat on the sofa in the library, the night he's murdered...