When it comes to modularity, I use it to the extent of removing some of the monotony of piecing together a scene. It’s like when you’re modeling something and realize you’ve been digging into the same menu or tool over and over again, and suddenly think “why don’t I have a hotkey for this?”.

This particular environment doesn’t completely adhere to some of the rules you’d be under while making something that goes into a shipped title, such as LODs, occluders, draw calls, etc. But if this was to go into a game that had to run at 30 or even 60 FPS, I would have to rethink some things, specifically how much (or how little) I’m using instancing.

With that said, I enjoy piecing together a scene by hand and making it come to life. I feel excessive modular pieces don’t allow me to do that without a heavy amount of layering. I enjoy trying to fit areas together and making them work: sometimes they do and sometimes they don’t but I love when happy accidents occur. Especially when I have to bridge something I accommodate for in my base modular set.

I do have some obsessive-compulsive tendencies when it comes to modeling such as not burying vertices, making sure something that should be flat is “perfectly” flat or anything cylindrical has a number of sides that is divisible by 4 (4, 8, 16, 20, 24, 36). So when creating my ship’s interior, I wasn’t worried about it looking perfect. I wanted it to look old and used, lived in, and have a feeling like the crew members were doing their best to keep the old girl operational.

Lighting

The main goal I had for lighting was the atmosphere. I wanted the air to feel thick with a lot of particles clouding it up. I pushed to make the lighting bright enough so the scenes didn’t fade too quickly into darkness but also felt like the light bulbs should be replaced and the lens should be cleaned. I also wanted color. In a lot of movies and games of the last few years, especially in the sci-fi genre, my pet peeves is that everything is so dark, brown and grey, and so drab. I’m really inspired by how they directed the lighting in Alien and Aliens, but I didn’t want my scenes to completely copy them, so I worked in brighter materials along with a lot more color. I avoided dark black materials or the bright white surfaces. Initially, my materials were all mid-tone grey but I hated how it looked especially when I introduced color into my fog and lights.