For the term 3 collaborative project, I have chose to work with Karl and Yann. I’m very interested in Karl’s idea, the theme is about Cthulhu, he wants to create a real-time animation in Unreal engine to show this theme. I really like the myth of the Cthulhu, and I’m also very interested in Unreal engine, I wish I can learn some knowledges and the production process about the UE4, so I joined their team.
Karl has already made the storyline:
The explorer discovered an abandoned village. The village was obviously abandoned for a long time. The interiors and buildings in the village have some elements of Cthulhu culture. There is a church in the village. The church has obviously been remodeled, and the gods once believed in are shattered, replaced by a statue of a terrifying Cthulhu monster, and the body of worshippers in the church. The explorer walks to the back of the church, and a strange sound comes from the dense forest. When he pushes aside the bushes, there is a huge eye oncoming him.
So I just need to find some references as he required.
My first job is to create a big church, it needs to be a catholic cathedral. Because the main scenes are mostly happen in the church, and there will be a giant Cthulhu statue inside. The church should be big and stately.
Therefore I started to looking for some free sources of church models. However most of the church assets online are scanned models which can only be view in distance. Finally, I found a almost 1:1 model of Notre dame, this is a huge file with lots of polymesh around 300 million faces. And my job is going to reduce its polymesh count and make it doesn’t look like a actual Notre dame.
This file looks perfect but there are so many overlapping surfaces between the mesh, It’s so hard to clean them, it’s painful. But I chose to stick with it, I spent some time dividing into several parts, like root top, spires, walls windows, doors etc. It will be more easy to edit and Maya won’t crash.
Then I do some damages on the root top, I made a big hole on the top showing that there was a huge monster crushed the church roof to outside. Finally I added some details by inserting the damage rebars on the root top.
In order to make some differences. I made the towers more higher and add more spires, deleted some prominent structures to make it doesn’t look like Notre Dame.
Because in the story, the character will be open the main door of the church, the camera will show the whole scenes of the front door, it requires more details. Therefore I need to arrange its UV into more quadrants to let high resolution texture map can be shown perfectly. The UVs of the rest of the parts on the top will be simply merge into the first quadrant. Because we can only see them in distance.
On the last part, I wanted to add more elements of Cthulhu on the front door. I found a skull head of Cthulhu, it’s exactly what I want, I placed it one the middle of the wall.
I’m inspired by the pictures of Cthulhu lamp, I found a tentacle model and make it higher taht can hang a lamp.
The last step is make the door looks like wood door, just extrude the mesh little bit. Then I was looking around some pictures of the church door, I saw there ware always some metal patterns on the door. So I found a picture of Cthulhu logo to make the pattern.