Auditorium fun

Hi there!

This is Sam writing about his journey on creating the DMU famous auditorium.

The reason we decided upon making the Auditorium in 3DS Max rather than create the rooms like the rest was because our Tech lead was having problems creating it from UDK.

My first problem I encountered was to get the size right. With the blueprints from Blackboard and the Queen’s building, I had to make sure to keep referring back to the actual level built to keep the size consistent. It was a massive pain as the rest of the queens building would lag my computer to the pace of a tortoise as well as the rest of the level obscuring my vision.

Making many reference images of the auditorium was essential. I was trying to get it as accurate as I can to begin with the modelling to make sure I had captured the main parts that made it the

auditorium we know such as the desks, the holes near the ceiling of the auditorium, circular shape, etc. It started off slow, trying to get it as accurate with the sizing as I could and has hindered my other responsibilities such as other assets quite dramatically.

As time went on and I pushed the auditorium further and further it started to speed up much more when I had the desks put in. With the room and desks made, this created a template in which I could use to gauge and create other assets. The chairs were copied and pasted with the exact amount as in the lecture theatre. Before copying however I had unwrapped the original chair to save myself time in the long run.

The curtains were a pain to create. I tried using the cloth modifier only for the plane to fall straight through the cylinder I wanted it to drape over. In the end, I had to take a different approach I found on YouTube. It involved attaching a group of verts to the cylinder and animating the cylinder to shrink. This would create a curtain effect in which I would repeat it a few times and then Turn it into an editable poly when I was happy with the shape (a little expensive in tris though!).

Screenshot of my progress

During my time on the auditorium, other members of the team would help me in creating some other assets such as the auditorium lights, seminar stand, projector and the white boards.

Sophia and I had an idea we wanted to experiment with in which we would have corpses and body parts hanging from the ceiling and littering the floor. I had her create a human body to experiment with.

After getting down the main mesh, I oriented away from keeping it as complete replica as I wanted to darken some of the furniture and assets within the room to better suit the mood and feel we wanted from the level.

Towards the end seeing everything fit together in the level felt really good. The experience I had with creating the auditorium for a group project made me feel much more confident with my 3d skills.

During the whole time, I had thought up many ideas I could include into the room, however most of them just didn't suit the theme we had. Oh well, it was fun thinking them up at least!