Now was the time to work on the main scene. My goal, due to the limited time, was to attempt to make it as I planned however, if after a week of work didn't show enough progress or I ran into too many issues that would take a long time to fix then I would make my idea simpler. I was following the plan I set in the tutorial although I decided to scrap the extra scenes completely for now and put my entire focus on the important narrative that the film needed. If I ran out of time the simpler idea would be to combine the concept of using stills and transitions to tell the story.
First was the set, I was unable to find a good one online as either they were on sale for a high price or they didn't match the style I was going for. I had to make one myself but this is when I realised, since it's a very dark setting much of the background will just be in the shadows. So I copied my set for the opening shot and decided to build it up from there so it would fit the main scene. I first decided to use just black walls but with the help of a friend I found a website that had free textures I could use. It meant I could give the walls a realisitic concrete texture.
This is the set I started with
To get to the next stage I had removed the helmet and body whilst also duplicating the road so I'd have a bigger space to work with. I experimented by putting one of the free textures on the wall. This was the result.
To me the texture felt weird and out of place, it didn't look too much like a realsitic wall so I decided to switch back to plain coloured walls at the moment. My thinking was that the scene was going to be at night with not too much lighting, this meant that most of the set wouldn't be seen anyhow.
I set the walls to black and began working from there. My goal was to use the basic shapes to create simple buildings remniscient of a modern city, similar to the one found in the game my work was inspired by. I used this image from my visual research as a light source of inspiration.
Since I am still a beginner to blender, especially in terms of modelling, I just wanted my set to be something simple but with features that made it recogniseable enough to be a city street.
I created buildings just by scaling up cubes into large shapes and placing them alongside the road. I also added a small layer on the ground to simulate the pavement. This is also where I decided to cut off one lane of the road as I felt a single lane road would help create a slight feeling of claustrophobia better than multiple lanes. Alongside this I added a small alleyway between two of the buildings by leaving a gap.
So that the camera wouldn't be able to see an empty space of nothingness in the background I put a wall around the area, this was another aspect inspired by the game as it featured many areas walled off and separated by a gated wall. Behind this wall I added a couple of buildings that would be silhouttes in the background to add to the depth of the scene and make the city feel bigger than it actually is. I also added in some smaller but still basic details in the form of little extruding parts of the building's wall or a ledge on the top of another.
Looking at the results didn't feel too satisfying, it reminded me of the very primitive designs of animations made when CGI was still relatively new. Whilst it was a good attempt for someone who is new, it would feel very out of place especially with the higher detail models. I had this as a backup but I wanted to find a different option that worked better.
I did some research online and found a solution. I could use the same program I used to get the character models to also get the sets from the actual game. This was a much better solution as it fit the theme and atmosphere perfectly whilst also having enough detail to match the character models that I'd be using. I extracted one of the sets from the game and then imported it into Blender, this was the result.
Whilst not perfect it was a huge improvement, it meant I had a detailed set with a lot of options on where to film and was completely textured. The only downside was that some aspects weren't as they looked in game and there were areas that the textures messed up. But I was able to live with these, as mentioned earlier it would be a very dark environment so this wasn't a big concern. Next up was actually beginning to animate.