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Writer's pictureFaith Hamill

The blockout

Updated: Jan 10, 2023

Tuesday 13th September 2022:


I made several iterations for my blockout, as trying to get the scaling correct was a bit of a challenge. I re-used the Scaleman I used during GART160, as I remembered that the height of that Scaleman was 185cm, a little taller than the average height of a man. Asgardians are typically a little larger than average, meaning it wouldn't be impossible for Scaleman to lie between the heights of Hella and Thor, the two people featured most prominently in the reference images I had. It took a while to get to a stage I was happy with, and that matched the scale and grandeur of the movie set, without becoming too large to manage as a project at my skill level. I decided to scale down the whole build of course, as the movie version is massive and extends on seemingly forever, so I may have to cut off the scene with a back wall or use a visual trick like atmospheric fog to create the illusion of a larger scene.

Trying to match the scales of the blockout to my references (Movie-Screencaps.com, 2017), while taking forced perspective into account


I also made notes on roughly how many individual assets I would be making as I continued the blockout. My initial estimate was around 16, and at this stage of the blockout, I had about 14, so I upped my estimate to lie around the 16-20 range, and made note of this on my Trello board.


It was at this point that I decided I should bring the blockout into Unreal, to check that everything looked okay. I also used this opportunity to re-familiarise myself with Unreal and play around with some new features. Overall, the whole build looked good in Unreal, with no problems in the mesh for the assets I had finished. I continued with blocking out everything using largely primitive shapes.

Because I never received a floorplan from Rising Sun Pictures, I continued using a mixture of film references, as well as real life references, such as vaulted roofs and the Chartres Cathedral, to help build up my ceilings. I created my own rough floor plan out of the primitives I had already made (shown below).

The most challenging part of the blockout was getting the walls and ceilings accurate, as that was the area I had the least references for. I did my best to convey the grandeur of the scene in the most accurate way, while making some modifications to make the build possible. In the original references, it appeared that every hallway had a vaulted roof, which I thought would be out of scope for me, so I ensured the main hallway had this shape but the rest of the ceiling will be a plane, for simplicity.

After finishing the blockout, I concluded that the final asset count is 17, which is fairly close to my original estimate of 16-20. With the blockout finished and quickly brought into Unreal to check for any mesh errors, I was able to refine my assets into their high poly versions, starting with the most challenging ones first.


References:


MOVIE-SCREENCAPS.COM 2013. 'Thor: Ragnarok (2017) [4K]' (18.04.17) Movie-Screencaps [online]. Available at: https://movie-screencaps.com [accessed 10th August 2022] - access dates kept the same for references mentioned/referred to from File Explorer but not re-visited








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