Level Design for Computer Games - Creation of blockout meshes

Whilst this is a blockout unit only, I felt it necessary to actually model most elements of my level properly, for this I headed to Maya and began modelling the required elements.

I did not make a full modpack for each building in my Maya scene however, I decided to create the main buildings in my level as one mesh for speed purposes, to give a proper look at my level as quickly as possible.

I created the meshes and imported them into the level, experimenting with position to make the visual narrative aspect of the level as easy to follow as possible.

Once I was relatively happy with the base blockout of the level, I returned to Maya to begin the UVing process, as we were informed that we could need to put basic textures on out meshes, whilst this is not necessarily a process undergone in blockout it would serve me better later on in the production pipeline, having a portion of UV'd meshes which could be appropriately textured faster than an otherwise non-UV'd mesh, bringing down completion time for assets at a later date.

I moved back into Maya and mapped meshes one by one, making slight adjustments to the meshes as and where necessary, and assigning them a new green lambert material once UV'd fully and re-exported ready to be re-imported into Unreal. I did automatically UV some objects and will return to these at a later date as some objects (notably the rails around the courtyard) have skewed textures right now, there will be fixed in due course though.

I took this opportunity to also duplicate the UV's on the meshes to a secondary set, creating simple light maps to allocate for lighting detail in-engine also, thereby avoiding potential major lighting issues when baking lights in-engine.

I have made changes through necessary design mofocations to the working of the shipping container meshes, in an effort to not only modpack them for further use, but to be able to position the doors as I see fit, whether I want them open or closed, after having a total of 8 shipping containers, I was able to drop the containers down to 4 or 5 variants and the doors separately.

This was also specifically helpful to the length of time it took to UV each shipping container.

Below is a shot of my current Maya scene, including all the meshes that I have included in my Unreal blockout. Also shown are a successfully UV'd shipping container and the UV's for the rail which is deployed around the outer edge of my courtyard, with some correct UV values and the incorrect values previously stated as skewing the textures, to be fixed at a later date.