After my flop at attempting Displacement Maps, I tried to sculpt the entire mountain range in Mudbox.
This was more the desired effect I was going for. The mountains were strong and tall, with all the little craggy details needed to make them look huge. The crevice also worked nicely.
The only downside the the phenomenal polycount reaching way into the millions.
To fix this issue, I brought the model into Maya and started working on the final stage.
When it came to modelling the huge mountainous valley for Abyss, I was faced with several different options:
As I was unfamiliar with Mudbox, I decided to stick with the more familiar Maya.
Following this tutorial I attempted to make the mountain valley using purely a displacement map and a polygon plane. Needless to say this did not turn out as good as I was hoping.
This was the displacement UV I painted:
And this was the result:
It wasn’t long after that I scrapped the idea of displacement mapping and turned to more practical measures.
This plan was made on a Google Docs sheet so that the team could see what needed to be made and what was already being made.
Landscape
Buildings (some can be half-destroyed)
Vehicles
Effects/Miscellaneous items
After deciding on our theme, I set about trying to draw a layout plan for our model centering on a massive crack in the earth. These were a few of our ideas:
The plan would be simple, with the main storage facilities and cranes relatively saved from the sudden fracture of the earth, but with some minor features like rails and trees falling into the crevice.
Looking at the picture there is an air of timelessness in the mechanics and architecture, so really it could be set anytime within the last 100 years.
While researching images of mining towns, the most striking and almost iconic looking results were those of the old-fashioned vehicles and buildings used in the 1920s – 1940s. An example being the image below:
So we decided to base our vehicles, buildings, refineries and miscellaneous items between the 1920s and 1940s.
For the modelling aspect of our development project, the team decided on using Katie Noble’s artwork titled “Abyss” as the foundation for our idea.
We liked the jagged mountainous terrain along with the ghostly looking mining town at the end of the valley.
The first thing that struck me was that the bottom of the valley is largely kept in shadow, obscuring what could be lying there, or what the cranes could be digging up. The first thing that this reminded me of was one of the opening scenes from Godzilla (2014) were the skeleton of a huge monster was being dug up from a quarry.
I was drawn to the idea of having a huge rift at the bottom of the valley that has swallowed a proportion of the mining village, where something huge had cracked the earth in its attempt to escape from the ground, and in the process destroyed the mining town.
The idea then was to tell a narrative: Something huge escaped from the earth in this mining town and the residents and workers fought back, but were overwhelmed and made a quick escape, abandoning the half-destroyed site.
Anna-Mation 