Starting The Nuclear Turbine Hall!!

With me done and dusted with the texture tests, I am now able to start on the main project!! I am going to be starting off with the Turbine Hall. I have done loads of research into this from gathering reference images to researching the dimensions of the building and some of the components such as the turbines themselves.

I have put all my reference images onto a A3 paper in Photoshop to create almost a mood board so i can see the colours that are used and what type of metals and just overall see what the turbine hall entailed and how it looked.

The turbine hall looks pretty complicated by these images, but from my researching and testing, i was right into thinking by approaching this environment in a modular way, is the best way to move forward. If you look closely enough, the big turbine islands in the center of the room are the same right through the hall so i only need to essentially model 1 of these. The rest is just pipe work and metal beams around the room.

To start me off i needed to know what the actual size of this turbine hall was. I researched for a few hours and i finally came across a website that stated the size of a turbine hall is:

Building size = 180m Wide / 134m High / 445m Depth

This is a pretty massive building!! With these dimensions, i could now tweak them myself.

With this i could sort of guess how big other stuff is such as the pipes and beams but i did need to know how big the Turbine Islands are that are situated in the middle. I did some more research but i couldn't find a answer. However i did find out what components the turbine island is made up of!

This breaks the turbine island well for me and i could now research each of the components and get a rough estimate on the dimensions of these.
I have found out that the length of these turbine islands are:

Turbine island - 68m Depth

With these dimensions, i should be able to fit in 4 turbine islands withing the turbine hall.

Nuclear Texture Test #5

From doing the texture tests and taking a screenshot from the same angle, I did some close ups of the assets so i could get a better look at what the textures look like from close up. I did this for the Tank, Pipe pieces and the Wall. The reason i did this was because, from my scene screenshots i couldn't really see a major difference. The scene just looked the same in terms of believability from texture sizes that were 1024x1024 to 128x128.  Only difference i did see was from the tank but i expected this because its a bigger object and had more detail in that the rest of the assets.

As for the pipes, i couldn't see a difference from far away, but looking at these close up shots, i can definitely see a decrease in detail once it hits texture size 128x128. However, you will only be able to see this decrease if i went right up to the pipe. As there is going to be allot of pipes within my scene, I think i will stick to 256x256 texture size as it still looks good and believable from far away and close up.

The tank was my main concern because it has more detail and is a much more bigger asset. You can clearly see the detail decreases as soon as it becomes a 512x512 texture. The hazard sticker just looks completely blurry once it goes below 512x512. For bigger assets in my scene i will maybe stick to 512x512 textures and it still looks believable.

In the scene screen shots i could not see a difference in texture detail at all, and from this screenshot it doesnt look like there is a decrease either so again just like the pipes, i thought the only way you are going to see a decease is by going close up to the wall.

From this you can now see the decrease is detail but it is nothing major at all. I could easily get away with 128x128 texture sizes. it still captures the light pretty well to keep it looking believable.

What i have learnt from this is the more plain the texture is with only minor detail i could put at a very low resolution such as 128x128, but if i have things which has a good amount of detail, i need to boost it up to a 512x512 texture. By using both these texture sizes, i will be able to achieve a believable looking environment but with love resolution textures.

Nuclear Texture Test #4

Since my last post, I have now decreased the texture sizes down to 128x128. i applied all the textures to the assets and took a screenshot from the same angle. Here is the side by side comparison.

As you can see, many of the assets don't lose that much detail such as walls and pipes but on larger images such as the tank, the details go very blurry.
As these screenshots are from a distance, i will do a close up of some of the assets in order to see the detail at a closer view.

Nuclear Texture Test #3

Keep forgetting to update this blog! However I have now completed my small environment which I am running texture tests with. As i mentioned in previous posts, all these scene was done with just a handful of modular assets as i found this was the most efficient way to go about dealing with such a large scale environment (nuclear plant)

Here are some screenshots of the finished environment:

With the scene now complete, i will start to decrease the texture sizes and this will show me how much detail and how believable i can still get it looking but with small resolution sizes. This environment was made with 1024x1024 textures.

Nuclear Texture Test #2

From my last post i have been continuing with my nuclear test scene. I have made changes to the wall textures and i have added more materials to the other assets. I have also gave the scene windows in the roof as i believed the scene i was doing was to enclosed. Iv also added some liitle details such as vents and grates on the floor. these were all done with planes, so again i am not taking up any poly counts.

I changed the wall texture to a metal shutter texture and as you can see, the windows on the roof open the scene up a little bit more and that sun light makes it stand out a bit more.

I now need to add a few more pipes and give it a little more structure to make the room more full. Once this is complete, i will then start to decrease the texture resolutions and see what the lowest is i can go to. The texture size i have started out as is 1024x1024.

I could add a lot more to this scene such as barrels and objects laying around etc but i wanted to see how far i could get with the scene just by the assets i have already modeled as when it comes to doing the real environment, i don't want to be modelling all different things, i want to keep it to a bare minimum but yet still make it look really believable and interesting.

Nuclear Texture Test #1

Sorry i have not been posting here. Been so busy with my scene that i have been collecting all the images to post here :)

So as i said in my last post that i was creating a simulation for a nuclear regulations for training purposes, my main limitation to creating this was that the simulation would have to run on low to medium spec computers. As i knew i wouldn't be able to create a high resolution, high poly environments, i thought i needed to do a texture test first to see how low resolution i could go in order to still capture the believably in the scene.

To start me off i looked at a lot of different images from nuclear plants and tried to break it down into parts and also looked at the different materials that were used. As i saw it was mainly metals materials and i also saw that a lot of the objects such as machinery and metal posts etc were all duplicated and were the same throughout the environment. I instantly thought that making my nuclear scene a modular environment would be the best way to.

I then started making very basic objects in side Maya. I made some pipe pieces, a wall, a floor and so on. I kept the poly count very low but still kept the shape. I was only making a testing scene so i knew i didn't need many objects for now. Here are the models i have:

Once i had finished these, i then imported them all into unreal engine and i started to piece together a small scene. I set up the grid in maya to match the unreal engine grid so my assets would snap together more easily.

I put basic textures on the walls, i wasnt sure if to keep these textures but i just put something on there for now.

I started adding some structure to the scene with the posts and pipes. The images i saw of a nuclear plant, the pipes just ran everywhere so i knew i have no limitation as to where i can place the pipes.

I added some tanks to give it a more industrial look. This is all i am up to at the moment, just adding more pieces and changing things around. :)