Group Project - Off The Map

The British Library have partnered up with Crytek and Game City to allowing top students from game art related courses throughout the UK to create historically accurate levels using the British Library’s maps. The maps to pick from are Stonehenge, Pyramids of Giza and 17^th century London.

A bit more info here : http://www.crytek.com/blog/crytek-challenges-students-to-go-off-the-map-with-cryengine--3

A few weeks back we were giving the amazing opportunity to be a part of this, plus it lines up with our group project quite nicely. We were not giving the choice on which map we wanted create, we were told we had to recreate 17^th century London. I don’t blame them, as the other 2 maps are just completely uninspiring, artistically and technically. This map will push our skills as artists.

We have to re-imagine 17^th century London (just before the Great Fire) in 3D, using the power  of CryEngine from Crytek. The really nice thing about this is that it’s a competition between 10 different university from the UK and I’m pretty competitive, so I’m determined to get first place and with the team we have, I know we can. If we do come in at a high place/win it, I think we have a level flythrough/presentation at Game City. Not only will that boast my self-confidence, but it’ll be a massive highlight on my portfolio to potential employers. Its experience and achievements like that which will give me the edge over other students  applying for jobs. I’m sure Game City will be full of head-hunters looking out for new talent to snap up too, I want to be ones of those people who get snapped up. So I need to do everything I can impress them.

The first week we discussed what area we wanted to do and got down some basic ideas. We wanted to stay true to the real events (The Great Fire), so as homage to it, we will model Pudding Lane and the surrounding areas.

The second week we went to the British Library where we got many pictures of the maps made from around that time. The team then started to research into the history and to knock out some quick 2d concepts. As I’m stronger on the 3D side of things, I was tasked to model a detail white box of pudding lane from the actual maps we got hold off from the library. Doing this gave the other people a good start with the concepts, as they could paint over the renders. But it also gave us a general feel of the level and a good idea on how to approach the modular buildings.

Basic whitebox of Pudding Lane

Basic whitebox Pudding Lane

The third week we prepared for our group presentations and carried on with our tasks set from the week before.

The forth week we all agreed to make enough individual assets which could be put together to make several different houses.

Below you can see an example of how we are going to approach the buildings. Creating it in a modular way allows us to create many unique houses in a short amount of time. Which is a very effective technique for the scale we want to achieve.

Selection of all the unique assets i made

Using the above assets in different ways allowed me to build 2 different houses

That’s it for now, ill post an update soon on my progress with the project. Or head over to our group blog here: http://puddinglanedmuga.blogspot.co.uk/