Modeling

My modeling process for creating sci-fi environments is pretty straight forward, I start with reference or concept and take it from a thought to a blockout. I try to spend quality time in the blockout phase to really nail down what works and what doesn’t work. When I’m done with my blockout phase, I start to refine the shapes, giving priority to the most important or most used pieces. When I have a few shapes that I am happy with, I cut them out of the meshes and keep them as floating geo that I can quickly insert into other meshes. Something else valuable is to have a character model in the scene you are working on. This helps with scale and if someone needs to get into the files after you they know how big the pieces are compared to the player. As for software, we use Maya at RAD but when I’m at home I use Max. At the end of the day though it does not matter what you use, what matters is the final result. To find more details about how RAD works check out the presentations online by visiting http://www.readyatdawn.com/presentations/. Hope that helps!

Doors

The most important first steps when creating a door is knowing the size of the door and then having a conversation about how the door needs to open and accommodating that need. Let’s say for instance the door has moving parts that pop outward, do you need to accommodate for that in the doorway or do those pieces need to animate back before the door opens? Having conversations early will help everyone get on the same page and eliminate any confusion when moving forward. The next step is blocking everything out and seeing what is or could be a problem. Personally, when I’m making sci-fi doors I create sleeves for the doors to socket into because it looks better than having the doors clip through geo when they open. Lastly, my favorite sci-fi doors happen to be the doors that look and function similar to submarine doors, they just look and feel believable.