Big things have small beginnings

 Let me preface by saying this is all very early WIP shots and will change over time. I Wanted to display this work in a changing and evolving manner overtime as I complete it. I wanted to share my process with others and any employers who come to visit my page and understand my processes and thinking better. Simply put, this project is challenging in scope but amazingly enjoyable and fulfilling. 100% of the work has been done by me. 

In this portfolio section  ArtStation - USCC Nostromo Alien 1979 Vertical Slice Demo Presentation, James Brady is my project of the Nostromo running in Unreal 5.3.1 engine. Completing as a passion project as I am an avid Alien Franchise fan, I also wanted to show my skills more directly to potential employers that come across my portfolio. In this project I have refined a number of skills, relearned others that dulled and challenged myself to do a solid project that I can be proud of and lead headfirst pushing the bar of quality of my work higher. 

In the past 8 days I have learned a great deal on progressing, organizing, coordinating and implementing a project on my own, keeping in hustle mode and being single minded and driven to complete this project through while having a blast while I do it.

While the scope regarding programming is going to be narrow and basic, my main focus more so is to show the environment as accurately as I can based on the 100 or so images, I recorded as references from the movie. Granted even in 4k it is kind of hard to determine what is what given the style of the movie camera angles/shots and how lighting and shadows being a driving force in pushing visual recipe of the movie, sort of in a way being its own character.  So, it can be challenging to determine an object in that way, so while I may know the general shape/silhouette, this allows me a bit of creative license to drive the creation of meshes to populate the level in as accurate a manner as possible. Beyond the movie image captures I do a lot of google searches on websites on the Nostromo, set design, etc. 

The movie does an amazing job of using lighting to convey and drive the fear of the unknown where the creature can be anywhere lurking in the darkness. Using lumen in Unreal I can do this as well, combine that with the powerful feature of nanite, this will allow for creative freedom on modeling while being mindful of budgetary constraints on polys, textures, draw calls, keeping my eye on the profiler when possible as I progress to keep the fps at or above 60 fps.

My goal is to complete it in 2 months approximately (maybe a bit more depending on the criteria involved) and have a basic playable vertical slice of a demo in a manner of speaking. I am by no means a programmer so the aspects of that will be driven by blue printing as I always wanted to learn a bit of coding. but my main focus being environmental and character modeling and design. I will be using my alien creature I modeled which is displayed on my portfolio. 

This project has been challenging but I have completed a good amount in 8 days so far. I still have much to do, refinement, modeling, optimizations, texturing both in painter and designer, tweaking and implementing basic code features, one soon being able to climb the ladder so i can go to the next level below or above and then expand from there as I progress and check off items on my list.

Be sure to keep tabs on this if you want to follow as I will have more content to come as I progress and add things in. Thank you for looking and if you have any questions I will certainly try to answer. :)