Statue Idea

These are screen shots of a character i have created that I was trying to turn into a statue to put into the ice cave in my scene as part of the video to give the island a bit more identity, as the armour would ideally relate back to the patterns on the obelisks. Unfortunately I was unable to export the final model from Maya into the scene so it is not going to be in the final video.

Development

 Above is a screen showing how by changing the time of day and the fog settings the environment can really take on a different atmosphere.

 I have begun using some of the particle effects in CryEngine to make the 'spaceship' objects crash into the valey and appear as if they are exploding upon impact, this is a screenshot of the explosion in action above.

 and here is the smoke after the explosion above.

 This shows an explosion from the perspective of the character in game mode whilst looking through the binoculars to change the focus. It also looks through the fog to show a different effect.

This is the crash site afterwards

Effects Testing

This shows a test run of one of the ships crashing into the valley with some effects added to the ship. The explosion file is strange and creates large white octagons instead of realistic lighting, hopefully I can change this.

Process: SketchUp to CryEngine 3

These are some screenshots of my work as i was importing the components from Google SketchUp into CryEngine 3, a good quick video tutorial for this that I watched is linked here:http://www.playuptools.com/videos/playup2cryengine2.html

 Above is the newly edited sketchup scene's exterior

close up of the "crashed ship" component 

Ice Obelisks

A ship crashed into the cave

Cave entrance

Cave interior

X-ray plan view of the cave

Plan of entire site on sketchup

X-ray view of model

Above is a screen of playing around in the CryEngine 3 programme, where I have had a go at recreating the snow valley in this program rather than exporting the terrain from sketchup.

View into the valley

Valley with the ships imported from sketchup

view of the ship..

In this view of the ship you can see where the parts that have visible 'back faces' are completely see through, which doesn't make sense for the the ship which is all solid on the outside, so I need to go back into sketchup and refine the model so that there are no visible back faces.

This is interesting with the texture on the terrain in this programme, while it looks like cliffs and ice from afar, when the camera is close there is no fine detail texture material, so I will need to fix this for the video so that there are no shots of the underlying grid on the surface.

This is the texture from afar, and the texture is beginning to get repeated/tessellated at this size, so I should maybe look at making the area smaller.

This is the ship refined in sketchup to have no back faces.

Something was going wrong with importing the files here with the ship and the different textures I applied to the ship in sketchup being bright green in CryEngine, so I saved the ship as a differently named file and re imported it to get it right.

Above is a screen of the scene where i have begun animating one of the ships crashing into the valley, the purple lines with the red connectors show the path through the different keyframes

Screen with the sun shining through to see the effects of the light in the program

Further Renders

With these renders I have included a background HDR environment to give the image some context other than what I have created. The default grey background of DE did not really suit this design.

This render below is the interior cave with the light coming through the hole in the ceiling of the cave as another approach to the lighting.

More Renders

Here are a couple more renders showing some details within the cave I've created in the scene

Cave Render

This is a render of the cave in my scene, I need to adjust the lighting to display more details in the cave, but this render will help show the progression as I refine the design.