Tuesday 18 December 2012

Part 3

1.
Learning how to do landscape materials.



2. There were a few things wrong with the landscape tools like for example the visibility tool wouldn't cut holes in the landscape so instead I thought that I could have a cinematic instead to take you through after solving the puzzle.

3. Painting the landscape and experimenting what materiel goes well.

4. Now it was time for me to lay down all the stairs for the temple path but I had to create them in Maya first and export them over.

5. My level need somewhere interesting to start so I thought of a door you can go through to enter the game. (489 Tris)

6. Carefully measured the door to confirm that it fit the giant frame. I kept the theme of my temple puzzle. The round puzzle door has star signs and so this door has the sun and moon as a lock.(Maya render,670 tris)

7. At this point I need some type of view point to look at my environment so I quickly modelled and textured this into UDK. At the same time it textured the door and the frame.(Maya Render)

8.  Odd tweaks here and there. Textures on my pillar need sorting and I needed to construct many flights of stairs down from the entrance with side blocks.

a.
b.



c.
9. Placing of the pipes was a hard task to do. The 5 sided pipe wasn't perfectly symmetrical so I had to be clever and find a way to show my pipes lined up with each other.

10. When I was forming the rocks for the environment I slowly started to realise the potential of normal mapping as I knew it was difficult for me to figure out the NDO software. It also didn't help that I was doing all this through a dark laptop screen which had no screen back lighting.

a.

b.

11. Rock placement. I studied cliffs to get a feel where I should place the rocks and found that a near enough solid straight cliff face does look a lot better then a really rough cliff side.


12. This is the time when I started to work with the foliage tool using my own foliage meshes.

13. In half a day I quickly learnt speed tree and put the trees it into my level BUT regrettable because I now had these trees in the Lightmass kept on failing to build! So I had to remove them and manually create my trees in Maya.


a.

b.

14. Deadline was a month away so I had to get more assets into my level for the bottom half and I only managed to get half of these textured and exported into UDK. 


15. Examples of extra assets.



16. At this point some of the shadows on my object were getting messed up (shadow bleeding) So I did some tests and studied light map tutorials carefully. I found all my light mapping textures were wrong but I didn't have enough time to fix so I winged it and fixed the important meshes and that day I learnt allot more about light Mapping.