Side Scroller- White boxing stage

Now that the main design of our level had been designed the environment artist stopped concepting and began blocking out the level. A white box scene had been started by one of our teammates. Yet for our first pass we just needed an white box consisting of block shapes.

By doing this the engine team could test our levels and give us feedback. And quickly we realized that that some of the platforming elements on the left hand side of the level would obstruct the view of the statues face. We then knew this side element of platforming would have to be adjusted. However at the time we kept it this way until we finalized a design.

This was our secondary white box. The engine team were able to place in moving platforms were the hands would be and make there movement activate when you touched the bell. Now that we all had a scale copy of the level we could begin to make assets. I was first assigned to try and help make modular rocks for the level. However not being the most knowledgeable on Zbrush and baking I soon ran into issues.

This was my first practice attempt at a rock and as you can see it wasn't very successful. I however continued but I seemed to not be making much progress.

This mess was my second high poly mesh and when I showed it my team mates and told them I was struggling they assigned me to work on other assets.
For the following week I worked on creating a variety of Gears for the bottom part of the level. I used a variety of gear tutorials learning that the teeth of the gears had to be the same sizes in order to fit together. This however allowed me to create the teeth separately and have them unwrapped easily by unwrapping the first and cloning them around the gear body. I also created frost style decals over the top of the gears in order to add unique details to each one.

With the gears created I then moved on to creating the trees for the scene. Our concept artist had made some silhouettes of trees which I then tried to recreate in 3d. 

This was my first texture pass to see how successfully it looked. But the tiling bark texture tiled too obviously and I wasn't truly happy with the alphas. 

With this new texture and with developments in engine to be able to draw snow onto meshes. This meant I did not need to include snow in the diffuse which made creating the tiling texture much easier. 

My next asset was the prayer wheels which also had a variety of designs created by our concept artist. We decided that the bottom right design would be the most successful.

The mesh was very simple to create with most of the assets being symmetrical or the came and so could be cloned around. 

When I showed the prayer wheels for the first time to my teammates our concept artist advised me to increase the size of the writing on the prayer wheels which was a scripture created by her of the worlds alphabet. This did make the prayer wheels much more interesting and readable. 

At this point most of the main parts of the level were in place so I began working on smaller light source assets,  These assets had also all been designed by our concept artist.

The different types of lanterns allowed us to have a variety of different light sources for different areas. We were also able to be quite inventive with the colour of the lights to add more interest to certain areas. I'm really pleased with how my assets turned out and that I was able to create a large variety of assets with different functions. If your wondering what they all look like in the level then stay tuned.