Practical Skills for Computer Games design - Containment Chamber Blockout.

To begin blocking out my Containment Chamber, I placed three planes and applied textures to each, using my digitalised orthographic images so as to give myself an orthographic surround to work from.

Using the orthographic layout I began modelling my basic structure, keeping tabs on topology and poly count as I progressed.

Using a cylinder as my base, I started by creating and manipulating subdividing edges to create a shape to be extruded outward to form the outer surround of the containment chamber, both on the top and bottom of the mesh.

Upon being advised to create a clear division at which the model's UVs could be split for easier unwrapping and texturing in the future, this creates less stress when it comes to texturing and though I plan on creating seamless textures in PhotoShop, it will make the eventual texturing phase a lot easier for me.
I created a fresh extrusion at the rear of the mesh which although not in my original design, could be easily implemented with the simple addition of a electrical access panel for maintenance purposes. Panels could be simply placed into a high poly mesh using kit bashing techniques to represent the access panel.

The finished low poly mesh with the rear extrusion added can be seen below.

Feedback Session.

Following the completion of my first low poly mesh build, I asked a group of my peers for feedback on my proposed asset.

For this purpose I needed to formulate another three questions, as before with the initial conceptual creation stage, the questions were as follows.

Q1. I am aiming for my containment chamber to be fitted within a sci-fi environment, do you feel the overall shape of my low poly mesh would fit within such a surrounding? If not, what aspect would you change to make it fit.

Q2. In a material sense, my plan is to go with either a deep metallic purple or a deep steel for the top and bottom sections surrounding possibly a tinted blue glass chamber, do you think this would work well for a containment chamber? Do you have any other material suggestions I may benefit from considering?

Q3. Bearing this in mind, my mood board is located HERE, how does my model relate to my mood board, do you feel I have stuck to my topic or veered away? If you feel I have veered away from the topic, how would you go about bringing my mesh back into line with my mood boards?

The answers received were largely positive, but two of the peer replies highlighted an issue, they could not tell immediately from the blockout, which side is the front and which is the back. Whilst it is evidently clear to myself, as it is my own conceptual piece, this highlights the reason I have been tasked with formulating these questions perfectly, to get fresh eyes and a second, third or fourth opinion.

Whilst there are ways I could fix this issue within the low poly mesh through adding more edge loops and working on maintaining the topology of the model, I am aiming to detail doors in in the high poly creation stage at a further point. My concept is to have opening doors that fit together quite snugly, taking this into account, I have added another image to the post to bring clarity to the concerns, and made my peers aware that I intend on adding in this detail at a later stage.