FMP: current ideas and thoughts

For my final major project I want to build an environment. Specifically a decaying city similar to the likes of what has been depicted in I am Legend or Crysis 3. I have not set myself on a particular location and think developing one from scratch will give me more flexibility than working from somewhere that already exists. This is what I am looking for.  (none of these images are mine, they are collages of existing media that I do not own myself, just to clarify).

 

I quickly developed some top view maps, just to understand scale and how I could potentially block things out. 

Here is a 3D whitebox of what I could pull off, of course after getting feedback on this by the tutors I realised that the scale was far too large for the time scale I have. Bearing this in mind I will probably build around one third of what is shown below. Also there is no vertical areas so interior will be implemented. Also focal points are almost non existent so that also has to be assessed and developed.

Project Two: Vehicle

 

For this 4 week project I was given 10k tri's for the vehicle, and 1 x 1024 as texture budget. I chose to work on an existing car instead of developing a concept as I thought this may prove to be a challenge to squeeze into this small budget. The goal of this brief as set to us by Codemasters with there custom shader's was to fake real time in 3ds max and getting the most out of our textures. 

I did some quick colour's and variations in bumpers, and then completed the vehicle within the 10k budget. 

 

After that, I worked on a highpoly for the normal maps, the bake worked well for some areas but I ended up painting the door line normals manually as the bake was quite pixelated in this area. 

Below was the environment I made for the setting, it was done in a day and is only diffuse maps with lighting. 

After this project I think i realized just how much I hate shaders. I honestly found myself working as a technical artist and fixing so many problems, bugs and glitches that it actually took away time I could have spent on the environment and other design elements. Though because of this it was a good learning experience of issues that could very easily occur in industry.