Experimenting with Modular Level Design

Recently I found a few useful Maya scripts to assist with level design/environment art. Since I prefer to concept my whole environment in Maya before dealing with the game engine, these scripts are great. They allow me to split my scenes, quickly swap out pieces and export the scene to UDK for testing important things like gameplay and scale.


The scripts are:
Ninja Asset
Ragnarok Exporter

I'm still using UDK until I can upgrade my computer. I hope there's a quick way of getting assets inside Unreal 4 too!


Here's what Ninja Asset looks like. I actually separate my Maya scene into different categories like Architecture, Organics, a folder for WIPs and a folder for kitbash testing scenes.

  Here are some of the assets I made for the project so far. Most of them aren't UV'd and the topology is messy, but I'm just testing these ideas out for level design purposes.



The following images are just some of the quick kitbashed scenes I made

Actually this environment is for my thesis film project so it's not thoughtlessly kit-bashed. Brought into UDK and lit with default night lighting. With this technique I find I can explore design a lot quicker than drawing it out actually because it's faster to duplicate a bunch of shapes around than to try getting the perspective correct in the drawings.

The only downside to this method is the results can be limiting depending on the pieces you have in your library, but you can always create more as you go. Since I'm doing this for concepting the pieces aren't all perfectly aligned to the grid either, although I try to align as many modules as possible because it'll probably be less of a headache later.

One things for sure though, I love Maya scripts. What would my life be like without them...

~

Spirit Asylum

Teaser for my latest project.

Blogger messed up the color AGAIN. Check out the proper version on my tumblr: http://visoutre.tumblr.com/image/81259458116

Rough Concept Art

Probably going to take a long time (few months) before I revamp my blog. It takes longer to plan something than to actually do it. But better take my time with this sort of stuff.

Speaking of which I started conceptualizing my final film. It started developing from another idea I pitched and the medieval models I've been working on in my spare time. Every day it evolves in a different direction, so who knows what the final product will be.

Custom Shape Technique

I have an interesting project in the works, planning to revamp my blog too, but it's going to take time to prepare my materials.

In the meantime I started using Sparth's custom shape tool technique for design. I love it because I have a hard time coming up with interesting shape language on my own, so this is a nice way to speed up the process. Didn't spend much time on any of these thumbnails, actually 80% of the time was spent making the shapes but I have around 100 of them now so it should last a while.

So stay tuned for exciting stuff!