A cinematic shot of the largest engineering complex, with in-progress Titans being constructed in it's massive bays
A scale shot of the 3 complexes, along with some Avatar Titans for scale.
A shot from the smallest complex, the Raitaru. I really wanted these trenches and gaps in the designs based on early viz dev where we could create dark, shadowy spots we could fill with mood and activity.
The largest engineering complex in profile. The XL structures were conciously designed to act as a back drop to the fighting that would happen around them, with large, flat, sloping surfaces a bit like an amphitheater for the spectacle around them.
Carrying over the negative space theme, all the designs were really packed with shapes to create these moody shadows and darker areas that we could fill with haze and fog to convey mood
Development shot, with an earlier version of the rear and some Titan bays
Early rear shot, with some mock up titan bays.
Quick sketch over of my block out on the front. I didn't use a ton of 2d during this process, except in situations like this where cutting extra lines into geometry to explore would take longer than messing around in photoshop.
A shot of the piston-like metal presses on the smaller complexes. The idea was that larger ship hulls and plates would be stamped together by massive scale pressure cutters and metal pressers.
Another quick and messy paint over of some of the geometry to figure out how to cut up some of the monolithic shapes.
First exploration of how Titans would be constructed on the exterior for players to see build progress.
A simpler version that would require less geometry to be loaded. With some really simple geo and some lighting & fx we'd imply that some large scale process was going on in each lit up bay, slightly concealed from unwanted eyes.
A large part of these structures would be container yards where produced goods would be stored. We needed 3 sizes of cranes to demonstrate the magnitude differences between each class of engineering complex.
This is the smallest.
The larger crane vehicle, that would stack 4 of the containers each pass. It had to fit on a similar geometry area to the smaller one as that would be reused
A really simple mock up of the absolutely gargantuan crane used on the XL. This thing was a bit ridiculous, being larger than a battleship. I'd of liked to do something that better suited that scale, but we were very limited by bones and polygons.
For the last year i've been working with the rest of the Eve online team developing our new player built structures, taking over from the wonderfully talented Pavel Savchuk.
These structures have been an immense challenge for me and the team - Artistically, we had to convey a structure that could construct everything from small weapons and modules to Titans. They needed to be self contained manufacturing lines, rather than sparse rib-like shipyards or hollow boxes. I spent a ton of time looking at car manufacturing plants from the air, and went with a very flat, boxy shape where we'd show materials coming in from the front, and finished products being stored and transported at the back. Each structure also needed a "lab" for research, so the central towers were modelled after corporate research offices.
