This project began life in 2010 as an idea inspired by the long, windowed corridors of airport terminals. I played around with the idea in UDK as an excuse to learn the engine, but dropped the project as my final year of university begun. Later, when Polycount announced their 'Brawl' environment art competition, and while I was thinking about a product for my dissertation on building believable hard science fiction worlds I picked up the idea in an effort to fill both projects at once. Competing with other university projects, I did not make the Brawl deadline, but completed enough of the scene to act as a companion to my written research.
However the scene is still in its early stages and I have been looking for time to turn it into something more substantial. I love the concept behind it; An aerial concourse of the near future, suspended hundreds of feet above a city shrouded in the clouds.
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One my goals in this project was to explore some of the more interesting shader effects within UDK's node based material editor. I came up with this hologram shader based around use of the bump offset expression, inspired by hologram effects seen in Halo 3. The three component parts of the texture are stored in the Red, Green and Blue channels of the texture sample, and then extracted, adjusted, and colourised before being added together for the final effect.
I was driven to recreate the architectural style of Santiago Calatrava for this project, having researched him and his contemporaries in my written dissertation.
A shot of my early experiments with the idea in the summer of 2010.
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