Any advice for designing environments, architecture?

[neosorcerer]

I think this will be a good topic to discuss with the upcoming "Uneartly Challange" :inocent:

So do you guys have any advice for designing environments and architecture? Right now I have a small collection of books on my desk, my own books on ancient civilizations, my sister's Interior Design and Decoration and my mother's gardening books. They all have some great pictures and I've been going through them piecing together elements that I enjoy. But the problem is I'm not good with scale and flow and function. Any help for this?

Where do you get your inspiration and ideas? Do you sketch it all out on paper first or jump straight to 3d? Where is the best place to start?

[kongni]

I usually gather images for inspiration before I start. If I feel that I need a more solid idea of what I'm making I will sometimes make either a 2D concept of the environment or a rough 3D concept to help me visualize what I want to make.

Scale can be handled by estimating how big something is and then using the measure tools in Max,MAya, etc to measure it up. If you are planning on putting your scene into a game engine, always make everything a little bit bigger than it really is. Not by a whole lot but a little bit of exaggeration helps.

Flow- not sure what you mean there. Level flow like for game play?

function- Again try looking at references. Making a scene look functional and believable requires visual storytelling. You need to tell a story through your scene. There needs to be a reason for everything that is in view. For example if you wanted to make a Medieval tavern, you might think, "Ok, there needs to be a bar, tables, stools, bottles, glasses, etc. Everything is made of wood, stone, etc.....BUT! You could take it a step further and ask yourself, "Is this a high end tavern or is it seedy? What just happened in the bar just a few moments ago? Was is just cleaned? Was is recently trashed by a huge bar fight? What time of day is it? If an ogre came for a drink, could he fit through the front door?....." The list of stuff you could consider can go on and on. The point is, the more you think about the scene the more descriptive elements you may think of and thus the more of a story you will tell through your environment.

There is no telling what the 'Unearthly Challenge' will be about so I wouldn't worry until they make an announcement :)

Hope that helps :)

[cookepuss]

Where do you get your inspiration and ideas? Do you sketch it all out on paper first or jump straight to 3d? Where is the best place to start?
It so totally depends on what I'm doing.

I'm not much of a sketch artist. Actually, I suck. :) However, I still like to start with an informal doodle of what I want. This lets me get at least a basic idea. After that, I hunt for references. If I'm modeling something grounded in reality, I'll either Google search of shoot some photos myself. If it's something a bit more fantastic, I'll always look at the alternatives - nature, fractals, dreams, and so forth.

Once I have a better idea of what I want, I'll head straight for the blueprints. That usually means a simple overhead scribble that I'll expand on in much greater detail on my PC. To do that, I usually work out the blueprints as a vector image (AI format) that I can import into my 3D package.

Once I've got the vector image in my 3D package, I'll trace over it with the primary structures like walls, terrain, etc.. After that, it's just a matter of working from big detail to small. I usually work in high poly. As such, I'm not as concerned with getting as many of my set elements into the same texture sheet. However, I do have to be well aware that stuff like RAM, poly handling, render speeds, xrefs, etc.

Anyway, that's my workflow for that.

Like Kongi said, don't worry too much until the UC brief is released.

[neosorcerer]

I'm not worried about the competition, I just want some general advice as I'm trying to build some stuff right now and get some practice in. Maybe it will help other people too.

So far some good ideas, what I mean by flow is the way that a player, or people would move through a place. Like.. how wide should the corridor be so that people don't bump into each other, same with stairs, doorways, rooms, how to arrange them all together and making it all look right on the inside and on the outside.

I've got a bunch of sketches now I just need to make it organized. It's probably just too complicated right now, I need to break it into smaller pieces.

Thanks for advice so far, talk to you later!

[cookepuss]

Some of what you ask is design related. If you're not going for strict realism then you can pretty much go hog wild. Just be aware of the scale as it relates to the player character and the overall mood. If you look at an old Quake 2 level, the hallways must be a good 10 feet wide and the ceilings are probably 12-15 feet high. More depending on the level.

As far as the real world goes, here are some real stats. A typical room is about 8-10 feet high, from floor to ceiling. In my apartment, the ceiling is about 8' from the floor tiles. With about 1'+ thickness between that defines the physical ceiling & floor, that's about 9'-10' high per level. In my apartment, the hallway is about 3'. The door is about a 7' height and a 2.5' width. The hallway outside of my apartment itself is closer to 5' wide.

In my local shopping center, the ceilings are about 30+ feet high and there are 4 levels, making it about 120'+ high. In anything other than a shopping mall, that'd be a 12 story apartment building. If you think about it, an indoor shopping center is actually a perfect example of a FPS game level. It's a super sized environment designed for maximum traffic, flow, and interactivity.

For information on real world stair building, I found this site to be extremely helpful to me:

http://www.bobvila.com/HowTo_Library/Stairbuilding_Basics-Stairs-A1981.html

It enlightened me because there are some very subtle things about stairs you never think about.

For fantasy stairs, you really need to just consider how it looks. Most of the time a game just treats it like a bumpy ramp. There's no detailed individual foot to floor collision anyway since most games treat the feet as a single unit.

In terms of general design considerations, you need to be aware of what your field of vision is going to be. If we're talking about a FPS that can greatly enhance or minimize the apparent size of a hallway. Play with the FOV parameters in your 3D app's camera settings to see what I mean.

For a 3rd person game like Tomb Raider or Mario you have to consider your character's "wing span." If you can have two characters in a t-pose in a hallway then you've got what I'd like to consider a nice minimum hallway width. It gives your character adequate room for turning and basic action. If a character is going to be doing some extreme moves like lunging or some acrobatics then the hallway or room might need to be bigger.

What you're asking, like I said, is a design consideration.

As a rule of thumb, some people just like to take the real world dimensions and (at least) 2x them. It doesn't always work and can wreak havoc on furniture/prop placement, but it can look fairly appropriate with a dynamic camera.

Real world dimensions don't play too well with game environments. Even in a game that prides itself on realistic locales, scale is something that gets fudged now & then. In the real world, people bump into each other all of the time. In a game, interactivity and smooth gameplay take priority every time.

Camera placement in real world scales is a tricky proposition. Just look at how TV shows place their cameras relative to the single room set, which (incidentally) is 3 walled at most. If you've ever seen a movie like "Nick of Time", which is shot in real world locations, camera placement is carefully chosen since they can't actually remove walls like on a TV show or a game. :) I won't even go into how actual screen framing (eg. 4:3 VS 16:9) can play into level layout. Just look at how different a level may be scaled, viewed, or otherwise laid out on the PSP when compared to a 4:3 console version. Different.

Lots of incidental considerations when designing a set piece. It's all usually easier in practice. This is just some stuff that enters in through the back of your brain.

[cookepuss]

BTW, as far as the inside/outside thing goes.... Depending on the game, different sets are swapped or certain detail culling techniques are used. Some games borrow from film techniques and will use a set for the interior shots and another set for the exterior/establishing. Some games will use a streaming technique and swap between the two when the player passes through a certain point.

The fact is, there may be some more recognized, popular ways, but there's no one 100% specific way. A game like Daxter will handle its levels/maps in a far different manner than something like Mario Galaxy. To each his own. It depends on the dev team, the genre, etc.

[neosorcerer]

Thanks for typing all that out Cookepus, it made me rethink the scale a lot. I went exploring in FF12, which is my favorite game for environment, and I found that all of the pathways and such were at least 2-3 characters wide. Everything is very big but there is so much patterns and details, props and clutter in shops, npcs everywhere, it feels very crowded and alive. Compared to Oblivion where the cities are so empty and boring, and the interiors felt cramped and you'd run into something and send it flying. Well the one awesome thing about Oblivion clutter is you could totally trash someone's house (except furniture which was nailed down apparently :brick: )


Anyway I'm going to keep working on it, see you later. :thumb: