Whilst a student in the university of Abertay, Dundee, I became involved with 3rd and 4th year Computer Games Technology students who were set the task of producing a game as part of the course content. Ideally each group of half a dozen programmers and writers would get several artists to produce visual content for their programming. The group's aim, to produce an exploratory 1st person game set in Victorian London, was one I couldn't resist volunteering for - such an evocative setting appealed to my interests in history, and is the sort of environment I particularly enjoy detailing. However, the team got only myself, leaving me with full responsibility to produce their art content, through initial conceptual design to finished execution.

Limited both by timescale, and the resources of what could be produced alone, the ambitious project first envisaged would have proven impossible to produce in the time limit. Working with the designers, the setting was focused in to one single, detailed environment area piece that could showcase their vision. For this, the location of Charing Cross Station was selected.

I quickly found that I couldn't have chosen a more challenging location to recreate, as research revealed that the original station roof collapsed in 1911 and was replaced, then it was bombed during the 2nd World War, and heavily altered in the 1950's, and again in the 1990's. This meant that extensive research had to be undertaken, cross-referencing photographic archive images and period illustrations, to replicate the destroyed elements of the structure; including the upper two floors of the hotel, the entire station canopy structure, the forecourt, and the platform fixtures.

Architectural details for the hotel and station structure were duplicated accurately from photographs, using surviving structural elements as reference points, and matching camera position and focal length to extrapolate the dimensions of destroyed elements. Platform detailing was based on illustrations, and therefore was less exact a process. I am, however, happy with the result as the best plausible representation of the environment, given the reference material available, and ably demonstrate my ability to produce convincing environments.

Textures were later applied through the game engine the programmers had selected; therefore this model was not textured within Max. A number of the textures created for this are shown separately.

For the entire scene of station interior, hotel structure and surrounding buildings, the model consists of a little under 110,000 triangles, comfortably within the budget set by the programmers for this piece, and allowing me to later add in a number of detailed static model pieces, such as the Gladstone steam engine also in this folio, to embellish the environment.