Winter Project - Further Development

After I had altered some code within my original unity project to produce running and crouching mechanics for the player I ran into some compiler errors. And when I say some I mean a lot. So I decieded to restart my level from the start and design it from the ground up. Although I was kind of happy with "Setup 1" I started seeing some fundamental areas where improvement could be done. For example I didn't like the start. It did not provide enough build up or anticipation. The player was just sort of there. So I came up with a few storyboard sketches too take the place of the earlier parts of the storyboard for "Setup 1". Below are few of these images, one actually uses an altered image I had drawn previously this year.

I really like the idea of big ominous statues residing over the bridge, so I went into a bit of development as too what statues I could use for this.

The practicalities of modelling a statue are beginning to make themselves apparent to me. As i'm not entirely sure how to go about it as of this moment. I could do 2 drawings, a front and side view, and model from them but I have a feeling that might be too blocky. A second option requires me following tutorials for either mudbox or zbrush. And a third would be just to find a free statue from the unity asset store. However I find this last option not too my taste. I want to make as much as possible in my own level.

So instead of dwelling on the statue methods I got into modelling the spawn building using techniques picked up through the multiple maya tutorials we have done recently. Starting was actually one of the hardest points of this process. I didn't know how and where to begin. So i started with a basic little bridge and then a bounding box and as soon as there was something there I was able to see where I wanted things to be. I've actually learnt a lot of things in the creation of this. Enough that I could re do this too a much better standard I think. Or at least more economical. But I do not have the time at present to do so.

I have started playing around in unity a bit more with both particle effects and animations. Both of which are relatively easy to produce but are hard to make nice looking results with. As this is only a rough mock up of the starting level I have only put basic textures into the particle effects. I however might have run into a problem with unity animations where I have animated each of the path segments by themselves without taking into account that I will need then triggered and doing so without somehow merging them may be a bit of a hassle. I will have to look into this more and see if I can improve upon this workflow for the next set of animations within this project.