Roman Ludus Cinematic Project - Finished

Finally!
Ive battled with numerous issues, from the project file messing up to loosing the UDK screenshot sequences and having to upgrade my laptop's HDD half way though putting together the final cinematic.
Its been a frustrating effort to get this project wrapped up.


So in summary: This is the final product of my 2nd year (1st semester) project for a digital media class at university. We had to work on an architectural visualisation and I chose to mix things up a bit and use a game engine for the rendering which lead me to UDK and to the 11 day level design tutorial. (Id never used UDK before, but Ive had several years experience using Blenders inbuilt game engine)

The building and surrounding environment is based on the Roman Ludus and terrain from the TV series 'Spartacus Blood and Sand' and 'Gods of the Arena'.

Id originally submitted a rushed version of the final cinematic for the actual assignment, but wanted to tidy it all up a bit more before uploading to youtube (thats the part thats taken so long to get around to doing)

Ive mostly used 3Dsmax for the modelling, but did a bit in Blender as well. Level blocking was done in UDK and Gimp/Photoshop for 2D texture work.
I did a lot of preproduction, including drawing up some blueprints for reference from scenes in the series and an entire design/planning document to refer to throughout the duration of the project.


And finally heres the cinematic:


Now, time to get into other projects :)

Back to Blender [finally]

With exams on the horizon I havent been too active with 3D work(s), but thats not to say I havent done anything.

The Ludus project is coming to a close (finally! Im seriously about to boot the whole thing out the door) and now Ill have time to focus on finishing my other 2 current projects, plus starting a third.


Not sure if Ive mentioned this anywhere, but Im trying to buckle down with projects at the moment. Leaving myself with 3 running at one time max, so once one of the 3 is complete I can take on a new project. This means that I cannot allow myself to get distracted with other projects (lack of productivity lately has forced me to try to rework my project and time management to try and help get more projects finished)
Any other projects I come up with get written down in my notebook and are pretty much forgotten, to be started when Ive completed some other project.


Either way, the Ludus project is finished, I completed the A2 poster for it a week ago, its pretty simple with a wide view of the cliff as the basis, the Ludus perched on the side in the lower right of the poster. The whole bottom of the poster is a 'making of' section which describes the process of designing the level and theres a few other interior shots thrown in around the place as well.




Heres a final shot of everything together:


I still havent finished the cinematic, but will continue to work on it over the next week or so before uploading.

And finally, I havent mentioned anything about my 2nd current project, the screenshot below is a sneak-peak, many people should know where its from, and what it is.

Final week progress

Got less than a week remaining for this project to wrap up (at least the major cinematic part, theres still one part of the project to do later but thats not so much 3D related)



The ludus is coming together well, Im just about finished making assets now, and the level has been rebuilt a bit for some extra rooms and the staircase connecting the ground level with the top, plus its all pretty much furnished as best as I can with the remaining time Ive had to work on it. Im starting on the new camera angles now for the full cinematic which will be rendered using Manitee.
I also spent a bit of time yesterday making a ton of decals. They should liven up the bland walls and texturing. Soon we'll be seeing walls with damage and chipped away surface, or the occasional stains, grime and blood splatters.

Last night I also got around to making a full 360 terrain object complete with mountains, which really adds to the overall environment. The terrain was modeled in Blender in about 10mins (would have had a migraine trying to do it in 3dsmax, Ill get to that in my next post)
Then I slapped on some rocky texture, which didnt really cover it properly (lots of stretching) but it doesn't matter because all of this will be in the distance, and UDK's DOF blurs the distant mountains anyway.


(thats the Ludus in the bottom right)