Level Design - Thracian Training Facility Lobby progress

Lobby progress and assets
assets with no texture. and below that is the lobby with full assets and textures.

 holographic transit map.

 hanging flags with Thracian logo.

lobby sofa

view of lobby through security scanner.

lobby with more assets.

medical centre doorway and the end of lobby.

lobby roof texture.

lobby wall texture and security corridor entrance without scanner.

 security corridor entrance with scanner and sci-fi greek columns

lobby skylight.

wall texture

lobby in wireframe.

marble beam with spartan helmet.

 moving billboard, 1 of 3.

Holo-computer

holo-TV

holo-map of base. (map of omega from mass effect)

Plant Pots.

Reception area, desk and moving holo-reception sign above the desk.

stay tuned for the next post on the security corridor.
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Level Design - Thracian Training Facility planning

The year was 2088, not much has changed. In fact things were getting a lot worse. The poor we're getting poorer and the rich was also getting poorer. Technology was the only thing improving in the world. People were desperate and trying to find newer and better ways of Living. Space was still a mystery. Are we alone?

 The idea of there being other life forms out there was sounding more stupid each year. Every year there was 'breaking news' that some rich scientist found something somewhere in space. Got to a point that no one listened or cared anymore........ Until E-Day.

I have started researching for my level design. looking for futuristic films and spartan history to create the ultimate training facility for my own characters ' The Thracian's'. The Training facility is a selection process to hand pick who is good enough to become a Thracian soldier, The best soldiers in the world. based in the future I am going to design a training facility to test all the skills needed to become a Thracian.

I choose to do a Greek/Spartan theme as everyone knows that the Spartans were the greatest warriors of their era, With every aspect of their lives and society geared towards warfare, Sparta dominated the Greek world and produced arguably the finest soldiers of the Hellenic period. Trained and hardened in the Spartan Agoge and Krypteia, their warriors and leaders are the embodiment of military discipline and virtue , and the Greek training and way of life were unique to them and actually alot of our ways in the UK are based on the Greeks methodology. When I started to design my character I wanted to create a future spartan but that wasn't really original. there was so many designs and versions out there for example master chief out of halo is a 'Spartan'. so I researched into the Greeks and the Spartan way of life and i found that the Thracian ( citizens of Thrace) are not to different from the Spartans. they had great training which produced great warriors, they even had the same style helmet. Also the legend Spartacus was a Thracian. So i decided to go with creating a future/sci-fi Thracian.

 I'm not going to go into to much detail on the character, I'm going to concentrate on the level in this post but I thought you should know why I'm doing this style.

Research

I have look at films such as the hunger games as I like the way they have made the training arena for the games. it looks futuristic and I wanna use the idea of holographic targets etc. I'm also going to use the idea of the training arenas being inside some sort of dome, My arena being underground I wanna have fake atmosphere like weather simulators and sky all controlled by a central hub like on the hunger games film. Also this kinda of facility really test your survival and fighting skills so it relates to what i want to create.

Resident Evil 6 have a similar idea with a underwater training facility for clones and different scenarios. The arenas are in domes underwater and each one is custom to different skills trained.

The theme I want for my level is a futuristic Greek/spartan arena so I am going to add the traditional columns  and Greek style architecture with a twist of future design.

Once I got enough Research i started to make plans for each room in my level, making rough blueprints and writing down what assets are going to be within each room. I had to plan out the blueprints for all the rooms to fit within a 2048 x 2048 x 2048 unit scale.

After roughing out the basic blueprints of my level I started to block out my level on unreal edititor (UDK) I started by blocking out the floor 2048 x 2048 then the walls which were 16 units thick.
below are pictures of my progress.

level blocked out, no assets.

Lobby rough Concept:
really rough quick concept of how I imagined the lobby will look like. later you will see how it looks different to this concept but you can see where alot of the room is the same and where ideas have come from etc.

Security corridor rough concept


armory rough concept


 arena rough concept

Lobby assets ideas

security corridor/security office asset

Armoury assets ideas

arena assets

Character design - future Greek soldier - Blueprints

one of the stages of character design are the blueprints. the blueprints give a better look at the character from different views. front, back and side. the blueprints are then used to model the character in 3D. so the blueprints don't have to be perfect but they have to be clear on what goes where and clear details for the modeller.

these are my character blueprint.

Front: notice that the clothing is to the side so that the blueprints show the full armour.

Rear:

side: 

the arm is to the side for the same reason as the clothing. So you can see the the full side armour.

all three blueprints together:

notice how all three blueprints are at the same level head to toe. 

Blueprints shaded. gives the blueprints more depth and makes it easier to model from. 

colour scheme 

I couldn't decide on what colours to have my character so I made a mini colour scheme. this was just to see what colour suited the armour type and the clothing, as you can see I used camouflage for the armour which looked really cool. 

Character design - future Greek soldier - The Thracians

This project was to design a fantasy/ fairy tale characters and remake a sci if version of the chosen character. I ofcourse choose to stay on my Greek theme and Thracian soldier. I had an idea in my head so I did a bit of research. Looking at spartan and other Greek warriors. I started to rough out silhouette thumbnails to get a general idea of what I want my character appearance to be like. It is important to get a unique character silhouette so it stands out and people can recognize your character.

Silouettes

Armour Thumbnails

Rear armour

Arm Designs 

Final Armour Design - Digital
Front Torso,

Final Helmet Design

 Rear Torso

 Side Torso

 Front Torso

I used photoshop cs5 to draw these digitally. I used grayscale tones to shade in the armour and give it the light and dark effect. I then found textures i wanted my armour to be and used 'overlay' on the layers for the textures to overlay for the shaded effect. 

Character Design - Mini Project

As part of our character design development we have to do a mini project which is to create a box character made out of paper using our characters we have designed. We have to paint our characters but in basic form using our Photoshop skills, unfortunately for me I have none, so this proved very difficult for me but a huge learning curve in my digital painting.
We were given a net template to put our designs onto so then later we can cut them out and assemble the characters to make them into a 3D cube.
This is the first little step on the process of designing a game character.

It wasn't completely finished but due to tight deadlines this had to do. but I am very happy with it. as you can see there are loads of detail. I didn't want to hold back and change the design of my character so i went all out to make this. It took me alot longer than I originally thought it would purely because of my lack of photoshop skills but like i said, i have learnt so much about Photoshop because of this mini project. So practice does make perfect :D

Below is my cube thracian cut out and built together :D .. and a selfie of me with him!.