#unit 68

3d environments are used for many things, people call their purpose into many categories, first: A 3D Environment is a digital space that was modelled by 3d objects and should be comprised of several objects.

Movies/Film In the creation of films 3D can be used in two different ways, green screen or a fully digital movie, with a fully digital movie similar to the creations of pixar, Dreamworks and many others clearly the movie would be created from many different environments all of witch would be created digitally with the use of software like 3ds max, Maya, cinema 4D. With a green screen situation where real props and characters are put into a digital space, which would need to first be created in 3D to get a realistic scene.

Games In games especially 3D games each level you play in are 3D environments people use a 3D environment for two reasons either an artistic choice to bring greater immersion, atmosphere and realism for the players experience, the graphic style of the scene can help explain and build the world you are in, weather story or backstory using only the visuals to help the player. The environments can also be used in game play as obstacles, in games the point is to have a challenge/goal, if the environment is interesting the level will provide interactions to the environment and make you want to explore it, the interaction in the game world is important, to it is ideal to have a 3D environment that persuades you to do so.

Simulations 3D environments can be used for more than entertainment, like in engineering and science, an environment could be created then scripted to simulate physics, example:b you could create a building then add objects to be affected by real world physics, using that you could simulate how the building would be affected by wind, rain, blown up, demolished or extended, it can give you a visual representation for what would happen in the real world. Companies already use systems like Bim (Building information modeling Bim is a process involving the generation and management of digital representations of physical and functional characteristics of places), Freeflow even maya and many other software to show ideas in a clear to see plan.

The mizuchi game engine show reel A preserved museum environment, a simple droid patrolling the room, working in the museum.

I picked this environment primarily because of the lighting , the warm bright sun shafts piercing through the windows, illuminating the room via a portal light tool, while looking abandoned the room still manages to be cleaned due to the working robot. The Mizuchi team created and published the build as well as creating the engine’s tools used for the build, Its purpose was to show off the power of their new engine, intended for next gen consoles and PC hardware alike.

Taking a closer look at the piece most models are relatively simple, however when looking at the fine details they have added and their texturing, materials, a good lens filter for the colours seen, together make a well thought out environment. They have also being efficient with their polygon usage, in background areas like the bookshelf you can tell that the modeling is simple, when foreground  objects like the camera close up are much more details, a denser use of polygons and a higher texture resolution and fine materials, together show a professional grade scene that understand real world lighting and an all around good representation.

For my Project I was asked to create a 3D environment of my own, so I decided to do an Apocalyptic scene where both London's big ben and the Sydney opera house were together under the sea with waves crashing down on the buildings.

What went right:

When I did the built in clock I managed to create it without experiencing any errors, this is because I watched a tutorial on how to make a hole in an object.

And with the Sydney opera house I managed to keep the shape by extruding it to get the same look as the original Sydney opera house, however I did not keep track of amount of times I extruded the opera house and had to keep backtracking a lot in order to make the model the shape I wanted it. To help with this I added a few back up files of the model.

Texture my Model so that it adds more detail to the object.

Add some animation.

Now in my next project I will be able to do both of these things as I am starting on my animation project.

Most of our work stuck to the timetable, however, on the 5th week, Thomas lost all the progress on the main part of the environment (the building) due to the file corrupting. Unfortunately, we did not have any back up copies saved so it was all lost. Luckily, we still had the furniture models saved as they were done separately and shared between us using dropbox.

After this, we were sure to back up the files by sharing them between us and saving them on each of our memory sticks and also by frequently uploading recent versions of the file to dropbox.

Due to this, Thomas had to restart the modelling for the main building, meaning we ended up behind schedule. To make up for lost time, I had to model the roof parts for the building while Thomas recreated the house. At this point, we should have been finalising models and began texturing. Also  we were not able to add all the plants and trees we wanted to include in the garden.

Using the Optimise Scene Size option we were able to remove unused assets such as materials that were increasing the file size and making navigating materials harder. This greatly helped at the end when we had many unused materials due to testing.

Final renders of our Japanese house project.