Week 16 - Container city week 2

The second week of the project was a busy one, for me this week was full of trying out new things and mostly getting to grips with engine, along side general concepting. I generally avoided 2D concepting as it's really not my strong suit and we don't have much time for this project, so I stuck with using basic shapes in max to concept how the inside of the containers would look. To start with I made a super basic box with a hand full of angles and a connecting piece so we could get it in to engine as fast as possible, it was super important that the blackout was done as soon as possible; it's a very short project and we want to leave as much time as possible for the modelling and general aesthetics. I decided to leave this 3D concepting a little while until later in the week so we could focus more on the layout/gameplay, so I took the basic container I made previously and arranged according to the floor plan we sketched out.

 It soon became apparent that the level lacked all verticality, something we discussed a lot during idea generation. So I played around a little and found I could repeat the shape we previously had again below and create an interesting path down to and back up again. This principle soon became one of the main ideas driving our concepting; the tower shape. The only problem was, at the moment, the really interesting paths took you to the outside of the building which means we would need to fake the outside bit as we really don't have the time to design and model an environment.
To help us with this we looked at some of the example work provided by unreal, to see how they handled the buildings and scenery in the distance; we decided to come back to this once we were more sold on a final concept.

As I went through and planned the route we would take I figured out all the mechanics we would need, some were still up in the air as the route wasn't 100% but for certain we would need a ladder of some sort to get back up and also doors that open as you approach them. So I immediately started to research how to create a ladder using Ue4, this is my first real attempt at engine work so it took some real getting used to; I'm still not very sure on a lot of things but as time goes on I'm sure I'll get the hang of it. As it stands the ladder is functional but is very glitchy, it took many attempts to get it working in the first place so I don't want to touch it again for a while. I'll be sure to come back to it at a later date. For now I'll just work on the other outside section and figuring out what the containers will look like.