What happened since the last time

First off I’m very glad to get the chance to write another article about one of my projects. Since the last time, a lot of things happened foremost, that I was fortunate enough to win an internship at Ninja Theory for 3 months with a competition conducted by The Rookies. After the announcement of the winners in July, Ninja contacted me asking for an interview to see if I’d be a good match for the company. Everything went well and soon after that I moved to Cambridge. I had a great experience working and learning from the most talented people I’ve met and gathered a lot of new tricks to get way faster and better and, of course, I had the chance to work on some very interesting things during my time there.

About the Project

In some sense, this scene is the continuation of the last project, but they’re only connected via the idea of a story based interior. This time around, I spent more time in pre-production to figure out what story I want to convey and how I can give more or less subtle hints. Quickly this project turned into a little homage to the first game I’ve played as a child. Maybe you can spot it? One clue I can provide you with is to take a closer look at the fireplace. There’s also more in the scene that tells you exactly what game I reference to, but you’re free to interpret the image as you like. Also, this time I wanted to hone my skills with different types of surfaces such as: the smouldering ember, Sub Surface Scattering for the curtains, refraction in the different types of glass, rendering fur, using displacement on the rug and the brick material and I wanted to create more efficient and also higher quality meshes and materials.

I like to draw a lot of inspiration from movies such as Blade Runner, Pulp Fiction, and many, many others, but also classical painters such as Rembrandt, or Caravaggio and also modern photography where I like to use Instagram and Pinterest to find really great resources. Usually I take a day to only gather images I like and try to learn a bit more about color, composition and lighting. During that time I asked myself the essential questions to determine my story and my scene:

Where is the scene located?

What time period does it live in?

What kind of space is it? Is it an interior or outdoor space or a mix of both? What kind of architecture is it and does it follow the trends of its time?

After I answered all these integral questions I started to sort the stuff I gathered and search for more specific references, for example: What kind of fireplace I wanted and what it should look like. Also, I normally try to find some architectural drawing, most of them have correct measurements which makes it a lot easier to determine the scale of the environment if you haven’t been at a place like this before.

Blockout Phase

I’ve started to work on this scene during my time at Ninja Theory and beyond. Since I had normal working hours and also a personal life (as small as it might be) I only had a few hours a week left to figure out all the pieces of the picture I wanted to make. So I spend some time to block in shapes to find my composition which took me quite some time since I wasn’t fully satisfied and I was playing with the idea to make it in real-time that I set aside for now to make something as good as I possibly could, still keeping in mind to work as efficiently as possible to conserve my time. My process was a little convoluted and from time to time I got carried away by things I wanted to try out such as the couch, I made in a very early version to see if I’m even able to model that kind of furniture. Also, I worked on a wood planks substance since I knew that most of my interior would be based on that kind of material.

So after I made my basic Blockout and lighting I brought everything to Unreal to go further down the path of a real time environment and expanded the original image to a whole room and spent a lot of time to make all that, even started to create more detailed things such as the bookshelf, the railing and the circular staircase, but very soon I realized my time was running low and university stuff got closer so I made

the decision to condense the whole thing down to a single shot, but I didn’t cut down the amount of details I wanted to have since this was the whole purpose of the environment and I made the final Blockout and decided to scrap the couch and use a pair of chairs instead. With a just a single shot in mind the whole scene got a lot more controllable and I could set myself a time constraint to finish it by the end of January.

These 2 images show how far I went with the whole room before I trimmed it down: