At this early stage in the project the most pressing matter to attend to was the Final Year Project Proposal Report that had an impending deadline. Within it we had to clarify exactly what it was that we would be creating, a basic outline of how we would achieve this and what deliverables would be handed in as the final product.

Alot of the content of these early blogs are cherry picked from my final report so please excuse the dryness of the writing on occasion.

As I've mentioned before I'll be recreating the Rec Room in Unreal Engine 4, for me the two main focuses for me on this project will be

1) Creating an environment that stays true to the original aesthetic of Ridley Scott’s film whilst still functioning as an interesting game-space

2) Utilizing an industry standard pipeline for the creation of materials and assets. This means using industry approved programs and work-flows to produce content that would then not look out of place within a modern AAA title. This includes a Physically Based Rendering material solution

I have access to numerous sources of information when it comes to crafting that unique ‘Nostromo Aesthetic’. Obviously with one of my key focuses of this project being the replication of the Alien look, integral to my research on the Nostromo interior will be ‘Alien’ the film itself. Screen grabs of the movie will be the basis of my mood boards and technical deconstructions of the sets will aid the modelling process. The film will also be the main resource of references for materials, textures and lighting.

There’s a couple of interesting issues with using screen grabs from a film as your reference. Firstly, these are not real spaces…and filmmakers like to cheat. You tend to notice during different shots things move about. Luckily the Nostromo was built as one huge set so the major architectural elements are static and can be used as reference. Secondly, the cameras and lenses used can have a real effect on the percieved size of an area. After some research I found out that Alien is filmed in a 2.35:1 aspect ratio using 70mm lenses. This setup has a tendency to squish the depth of a scene, making background elements appear closer than they are.

Apart from using the film to ‘eyeball’ a rough floor plan I was lucky enough to come across some old blueprints from the movie that the set designers used when constructing the set, this was very helpful at planning out an initial layout to the scene.