The time has come to finish the models in Maya!
As of last update, the things that needed fixing up from the blockout were the bars along the walls,
and I needed to add an actual background to the scene. Looking at the scene from the X-Men films, and from the concept art of the scene I found, the prison is placed atop a pillar in the centre of a large cavernous space, with pipes and wires extending around it. Actually watching the scenes in the film, you can't really make these details out, but they exist in the concepting process, and I think it would make much more sense to model at least a primitive version of them so the scene makes sense physically.
I started off with the bars: I felt it best to get the actual cell finished before worrying about a background. I took one of the blockout cylinders and pulled it away, and then I rotated the top and extruded along the top. The resulting bar, therefore, was made entirely of one cylinder, which made it much easier to UV: once I had done done all this, I copied it and mirrored it across the axis so that all the bars would be equally distanced from each other. After this, I copied only the vertical sides of the bar and arranged them across the sides of the cell. The result looked like this.
With that, I felt confident that the model of the cell was complete: to show it off a little more, I got screenshots of the wireframe:
After this, the only things left to model were the background scene and the pipes.
For these, I reasoned that they wouldn't be seen close up or in detail: indeed, the purpose of the background is to be so dark that you can't see anything there. The pipes, while practically invisible in the film, may well show up when light is cast on them, so I reasoned that I should make them very clearly pipe-like without making them very high-poly.
I started with the background scene. I used a single cube as a start, and then simply added lot of cuts and extrusions to pull it down and then up and around the cell. To make it as low poly as I could, I used Target Point Weld to merge all extraneous faces together, which resulted in a shape made up of only four sides all the way around.
After that, I created one pipe out of a cylinder, which I then cut edge loops around and moved to make it look as if the pipe was curving. After making one, I simply copied it three times and moved them around the sides of the cell: I made them a little asymmetric to make the cell look slightly more interesting.
To make the scene look a little more realistic, and to help me ensure that the correct objects were all accounted for when doing UV mapping later on, I decided to add a transparent material to the areas of the cell that would be made of glass. After doing so, I found it was much more pleasing to look at: it allowed me to visualise the final look more easily. Here is the final model:
I was very happy with this result, so I decided to go one step further just before I started UV-ing properly: I took the model into Unreal and added some quick lighting.
I did this just to capture the mood of the model, and while this is in no way the final look, I think we're definitely getting there. Next up: UVs!
Comments