Task 1 – Hadleigh Castle week 1 – Research

The Brief

Our task for Project 4 has been to recreate Hadleigh Castle in Unreal Engine 4, by Hadleigh and Thundersley Community Archive. The task involved us getting into small groups of 4 with certain roles, including 3D modeler, Voice over artist, Programmer and 2D artist and a group leader. Together in our group we have assigned ourselves certain jobs on our Trello page and mark off what we have done so far.

The research we will be conducting involves going to the castle and using it for inspiration for our models and textures.

Research

The research we have conducted involved looking at castles from the same era and seeing reoccurring trends with castles built in that era to give us designs and ideas for our own castle design. One I looked at was Caernarvon Castle, a castle built in 1283, roughly the same time as Hadleigh Castle.

I found this castle interesting because it was from the same era and has the same structure as Hadleigh castle, being thick, sturdy walls with towers for lookout and defence. This castle inspired the designs of my 3D models that I completed as I used items from this time to determine what to texture floor hatches and wall torches with.

More research involved going to Hadleigh Castle and taking pictures of the walls and local area to be used for our own textures. We collected many of these and made them seamless so that we could use them in our project.

We have many of these textures readily available for use in our project now.

Here are a few examples of pictures we collected :

We have a mixture of walls and floors that we will use in the final design.

Ideas

We will be using wooden signs around the castle which when interacted with will play an audio cue which will say a fact about the area the player is in.

We will use ladders and ladder hatches for historical accuracy

All buildings should be enter-able, with lots of detail including tables, wine glasses etc. We will also have wall mounted swords and shields.

We will use particle effects for torches and campfires/fireplaces.

Player starts off at the front gate of castle so they can explore the entire project in order.

Concept art for all designs we have created on trello, here a few for the torch, hatch and towers/walls.

Resource Requirements

-Autodesk Maya

-Adobe Photoshop/Illustrator

-Unreal Engine 4

-A3 Sketch pads

-Access to castle, our own textures and photos we took.