Unearthly Challenge 2009 | TheThing (1)

Hello there developers,

A Torque 3D ride and I was convinced yet again to fiddle around with it and make some pretty shots using its gears. The challenge is quite interesting and I hope to have some fun with it as I had an instant idea about what I wanted to do for this. Read along, more posts as I progress (and more, outside the contest, is a promise).

Joined kind of late here but I am hoping to finish in time my entry.

Here's my take on this challenge: a simple environment, as simple as it can be, with a point of interest that really draws the attention, just like the rules say : )

Abandoned, strangely worn and damaged stuff always attracted me so I decided to go that route. My scene is in the interior of a building and includes a small hallway, a big room and a smaller room separated by the first room with a door and a glass wall. The scene is setup so that I can take exactly 2 shots: one from the small hallway pointing to the glass wall (the archway separating the hallway and the big room makes a nice top for the shot); a second snapshot will be taken from the back of the big room, pointing the camera at the same glass wall, in effect, at what is/was behind it.

The work on this started with the pen on paper (well, the tablet); as you can see from the sketch/doodle, is not much of a art piece but it helped me quickly visualize the scene and figure out the basic layout.



Step two, rough layout modeled in low poly. Actually, my plan is to keep this as low polly as literally possible and take advantage of the Torque material system. So far, the entire scene base mesh has 1320 triangles. I believe it will not exceede 2500 triangles after I add more features on it, such as worn and bits apart.



My favorite step in the early prototype stages is playing with the base model and figuring out the mood of the scene, the lighting and colors. It changes quite often in the process but that's what I like about it, experimenting various possibilities.



You probably figured out already that the subject matter in the entry is missing or at least not named : ) Well, it won't. The challenge in this piece is to convey the player a feeling of 'something happened here' with possibilities left and right as to what exactly did. The small room will indeed have a thing there and it will be shown in the final shots. Various objects around will help the player want to stay more and play with stuff or explore, investigate further

Enough for now, time to move onto real work. As I progress along I will let you guess what exactly did happened in the small room. A little game, let's call it.

Thanks for reading and feel welcome to comment