I was asked to develop a new form of presentation of the illumination pieces that Castros produces. My idea was to develop a small level where they could watch, "play", the diferent illumination pieces in terms of scale and in terms of effects on the landscape in a given area. Providing not a guided tour but a full interaction with behavioral freedom. The area chosen was the Rossio Square in Lisbon, Portugal.
The project began with a trip to Rossio where I could photograph the area with as much detail as possible, with particular emphasis on the various statues and monuments on site, among other objects that had relevance to the place.
After taking the shoots photographic, I started the creation of the plaza in unreal development kit. Here my concern focused on the creation of physical space in a realistic manner, respecting the different scales and proportions. After completion of the block out in the UDK, I began by testing the interaction that you have when you started to "play" when entering the map.
I started the modeling of the various pieces, with only four days to complete them. Having a sense of the short time available I decided to respect at maximum the silhouettes and different scales of statues or monuments and modeling with the lowest possible number of polygons.
Followed by the texturing, here again with a very small timeline, I tried to meet the color of the different models. Here crazy bump for the creation of normal maps and photoshop, diffuse and specular maps, became very important. Besides the limitation in terms of polygons, I had to take into account small details for each of the parts - lightmaps (2nd UV Channel), the creation of single 3D model, all in a single texture shader, the axis in lower part of the model at ( 0,0,0) for export in the FBX format. For this project I created several animated characters to populate the area.
All work from now on was developed in the unreal development kit, with the integration of some models, the trees, and various particle effects. Here I developed all the lighting effects and add some fog, depth of field to give more realism to the scene.
The project unfortunately was not fully completed for as this was only a proposal it was important to understand how long it would take to complete a small level and the different forms of interaction with the main piece, which was developed with light particles and materials of the Unreal Development Kit. Read Less