Well, this is what took up my time for the last 3 months and made the previous 3 weeks absolute hell. It’s the dreaded dissertation and practical project.

 If I am being honest, and I’ll say this now before anyone has read it, this includes myself or any proof-readers due to time-constraints… I didn’t think the writing of the dissertation to be that difficult… infact, in some sort of sadist way, I actually enjoyed it. I often have a lot to say, especially in regards to games or football and luckily this fit one of those criteria. As a self-professed gob-shite and angry person it allowed me to write enough words to cover near enough the 10,000 guideline (it’s actually just less than 300 words short).

If I had more time on the project I could have written a lot more, there are many things that aren’t covered and those that are are quite brief, so for those reading it I can only appologise. If I have any need I can always extend the dissertation, but frankly I don’t see that happening. I may even write some Adobe Photoshop and Autodesk 3D Studio Max tutorials on this site. The dissertation itself was written in Microsoft Word 2007 and is formatted as such, however it is backwards compatible with Word 97-03, but it will not look correct, if you open it in Word 2007 you will see it formatted as it should appear. You can download the Word 2007 compatibility pack here whether or not this will make it appear as it does in Word 2007 or not I am unsure, but the file will work in any version of word already. Thats only for those who are looking for a good read or want to learn about what a couple of things like normal maps are or how to model the most basic building.

So onto the project.. I am particularly happy with the actual model and texturing, however the video is not a fair representation of the model, it was rendered at the lowest settings simply due to render time. The actual duration of the render was 52hours. Or 3,120 minutes (It sounds like more!). As a result shadows are un-antialiased (or aliased ), textures aren’t as sharp as they could/should be. There are many things I am not 100% happy about, but with the settings I wanted it was predicted to take anywhere between 7-8 weeks! That was a nasty surprise.

Because the project had to be handed in a lot earlier than I originally planned, the environment isn’t as large as it could, or should have been, nor are the buildings varied enough (though that’s pretty much accurate to environmental architecture). Texture wise I used 78 textures (not including normal or bump maps) on 2 buildings, yet managed to texture the entire the entire environment with 160 textures, this was again down to time constraints because believe me, no-one would have rather used 500 textures on a small environment . Unfortunately this environment isn’t a full showcase for my ability as a 3D-modeller (yet!), however it does go someway to showing what I can do. I hope you like it. Perhaps I have seen so much of it that I have nothing left but to tear it apart.

Geometry wise the environment uses 120,000 polygons including the use of IDV’s SpeedTree, a plug-in for Autodesk 3D Studio Max or Autodesk Maya and has been used in many, many popular games on both consoles or PC such as: “S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl”, “Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion” or ”Project Gotham Racing 3″ for example. There are many other titles that use this, these are becoming more and more popular. To use SpeedTree in an actual gaming project costs $10,000 so it’s a little steep, for this project I used the 15 day trial using the default diffuse (texture) and normal maps. The movie was rendered without wind effects which can be used in conjuction with SpeedTree, but as this was a project to promote my geometry first and foremost it was decided that this wasn’t necessary. Model wise if anyone is interested in seeing my actual 3D model then feel free to contact me and we will see if we can sort something out.

In regards to the video, it features the entire environment in terms of space but there are many sections that aren’t in the video, and many more that aren’t covered in detail. The video itself is around 52 seconds in length, and it still whips around the environment. There are a few kinks in the video, where for no reason 3D Studio Max thought it fun to render  the floor rather than what was infront of the ‘player’ in the viewport, but hopefully this doesn’t take too much away from what you see. A video lasting around 2-minutes would be a better representation of work, but again, as I mentioned (and probably mentioned 100 more times than this in the dissertation), due to a lack of time this wasn’t possible. The video itself is in the format of an AVI file, uncompressed for ease of playback on different systems, I didn’t want to take a risk encoding it in XviD for it not to work in the presentation… that would be embarassing.

 One thing I can say in all seriousness… atleast my geometry and texturing are stronger than those in ‘Resistance: Fall of Man’ on the Sony Playstation 3 . If anyone would like any help or advice in regards to modelling in 3D Studio Max then feel free to contact me via the contact page (I will add one sometime this week), this offer of help also extends to ‘Insomniac Games’ :p.

To see my collection of renders throughout the project: Click Here.

Use the following links to download the appropriate file: