Final Renders

There are a few final renders coming out of my major project work now as I prefer the marking showreel for Friday. Not all of them are finish, some still need ambient occlusion and some have unfinished textures but this is where they are so far.

I have rendered them out as still frames to stop it from getting compressed twice and will not be putting them into a video until the showreel so I can only show still at the moment.

Here are the books:

The bow and arrow:

The Staff

Church ruins:

There are a few more props and the characters that still need to be finalised and rendered but it's coming along well so far, I've managed to pick up my work speed by spending as long in uni as possible so I should be all set to have my showreel rendered out by Friday, and then that's my 3rd year completed.

More Particles...More Props

Tomorrow... tomorrow is the first submittal deadline for the game, it allows the tutors to see where we are and give us feedback on the what we need to do for the remaining few weeks. I'm feeling fairly good with what I have done, but I feel like I should have a lot more done by now, I can never quite estimate how long everything takes.

For the submittal I have been getting everything up to an acceptable standard so the tutors can see where I am going with it, but it does mean much of the detail has been pushed to the side for the time being.

I have done a quick diffuse, specular and opacity for the Ice Bow:

I have also been getting some of the particle effects done for the game now that I have a much clearer view of where the project is heading. I have already made the staff particles as well as the magic attack so I moved on to some more important areas.

I made a quick snow particle emitter to make it snow, I intend to have the emitter follow the player character without inheriting it's rotation so the snow is always coming from the same direction. If I have it emit in world simulation it should also stop each individual particle from following the player when he moves.

Here is the effect so far:

I also made a snow footsteps particle so that when the Fae is running he kicks up a bit of snow. I want to add some more opacity to it so it is more like the Bark Basher attack later on but here it is right now:

I also made some particles to go along with the Bark Basher's push attack where he uses his large shields in a lunge and pushes the player back. The idea is it kicks up a large amount of snow as they're shoved across the ground:

There are quite a few other props that I've done turnarounds for which I'll upload in a bulk post after the first submittal.

Playtesting and Props

We had our first playtest of Echoes on Friday, after plenty of hard work getting it into a playable state. I am impressed with how well everyone did and couldn't be much happier with how it went. We managed to get a working game out , with a few bugs, and had more people than I expected turn up to play it. So overall it was a great success and we got some good feedback in the end, and found a few things we'd missed while playing.

As well as the game looking promising I have managed to get a few more props done, time is getting tight now but if I pull my finger out I'm sure I can do it.

Here is an updated of the church ruins:

Only basic textured on at the moment, I need to sort out some of the finer detail and scuff them up a bit, but it's a nice start. It only has a diffuse at the moment, and a quick opacity for the windows.

Here is the staff which I've just started to texture:

There's not much to say about this, the texture is pretty basic, I want to add a few more details to it but it should be a surprisingly quick one to texture. I'm quite pleased with how all the maps have come together to make the crystal.

Texturing Time

Texturing has begun! I always like to switch between texturing and modelling a lot within a project so I don't get too overwhelmed by one or the other. This is particularly true about texturing as I consider it one of my weaker areas. Unfortunately due to the urgency of much of my work I have had to get all of the modelling, unwrapping and high poly sculpting done early, leaving the mountain of texturing to climb.

I began by going to the Centaur. It had been a while since I had worked on him so it was nice to be reunited with him again. I began by blocking out the base colours, then adding some texture detail. I then went on to render the normal maps and ambient occlusion maps to help give it some of that high poly detail. This was a bigger problem than I had hoped and eventually took me around 3 days to get to work...shame on me...I have always had trouble rendering these maps out and always waste too much time on them. In the end I used xNormal, I program I had used a bit before but this was the first real use of it.

Anyway, here is the current centaur texture so far. It only has the diffuse map on at the moment and it isn't finished, I want to work on the colours so they compliment each other more as well as adding detail to areas I haven't had a chance to yet like the quiver.

I'm quite pleased with certain aspects of it so far, such as the skin, which I normally have trouble emulating on my models. The ice has come out reasonably well so far as well considering the small amount of time put into them so far. The AO map has also massively helped to sell this texturing and I'm looking forward to doing more high poly sculpts and adding ambient occlusion and normal maps to my future models.

There are areas I'm not so pleased with as well, such as the leather straps. I always seem to have some kind of leather on my models and have never been able to get it to look quite right, I may got back and redo the leather completely. The rune like marking on his skin are also more like place holders at the moment rather than final ones.

I have also begun the Fae's textures, although these are in a much earlier form than the Centaur. As it stands the Fae only has blocked out colours and and AO map applied, this is because I get the centaur one working and I decided to get the Fae's AO done quickly while it was fresh in my mind.

Absolutely nothing about the Fae is final, and there is some AO cleaning I have done which isn't in the screen capture but it gives a nice first feeling of what the Fae will be like. The AO worked surprisingly well on the areas that varied a lot from the low poly to the high poly, such as the forearm detail and the roots on the feet, and could almost pass without a normal map, at least as a static, unlit mesh anyway. 

The textures are looking promising so far and it's certainly boosted my texturing confidence. I seem to have started this project with quite a bit more knowledge and expertise than I had before, which is strange as I'm not sure where it has come from, most of the work produced between last years game and this one was quite poor, but I seem to have pulled it all together for this final project and it is going much better than I could have expected.

Specialist Animation Project Part 1 Complete

So it's been a little while since I updated my blog, this is due to the rush to get this first assignment in and then sort out a 10 minute presentation for the next day, so things have been a bit hectic. But it's over now, it turned out well and I get to have more of a laid back week now, which I could really do with. Well probably not...but it's nice none the less.

Anyway, enough babbling, time to show what I handed in for Spec Anim 1.

First off there was Mjolnir, Thor's hammer, and Loki's Sceptre. I already posted up the basically finished screenshots but now I have some with proper lighting as well as turnarounds so here goes.

Mjolnir, 379 Polys:

Loki's Sceptre, 655 Polys:

The image renders are quite low quality, I do apologise but these were screenshots as I went along rather than final renders. Hopefully the turnarounds will turn out better.

Overall I was quite pleased with the props, I think they came out at a decent quality even though I felt I could have improved on them quite a bit given more time, but I need to get into the workflow of producing things faster so this was a good practice for me and I'm happy with it.

After we had produced these we had to model and unwrap a a character that went along with the props, and I'm afraid this is where my work goes downhill. I would claim it was getting used to Maya or something, but I think it was my own fault, I rushed into the character way to fast without getting the basics down and this had a pretty bad effect on my model, I managed to improve some of it, but I fear the damage was already done.

In my haste I appear to have submitted the screenshots without making a backup for myself...smooth...but they were only basic renders anyway as we haven't textured the character yet, but I still have the turnaround so here you go.

Thor, 6813 Polys:



It's not all bad, I was quite pleased with how the face turned out, even if it doesn't look much like Chris Hemsworth (The actor who plays Thor in the Avengers and Thor movies) I still like how I managed to get a level of detail out of the face I haven't been able to previously. It's all learning and everyone has their bad pieces of work. No point in hiding them and pretending they didn't happen when you can learn from these moments.

Just to touch on the presentation as well. The feedback I got from the tutors seemed promising, especially as nerves usually get the better of me during presentations. I think I was pleased with the quality of work I had in the presentation so I didn't feel as nervous about presenting it. The presentation was to pitch the idea we have for the final year dissertation, mine was titled 'Aesthetics as Metaphor: A Study of Embedded Narrative' which is a study of environmental storytelling and how subtle background cues can influence how a play experiences and game and what emotions they can evoke.

If I feel confident enough I will post my dissertation on here for people to read, but I've never been a very strong writer so we'll have to see how it turns out.

On to Specialist Animation Week 3

Week 3...the final week...for the first part of this project anyway.

I've mostly textured the two props now, which was expected to be complete by the end of the second week, so not too bad timing there. The 3rd week we need to light and render them as well as modelling a character, this is where it gets interesting.

First off though, here is Mjolnir:

And Loki's Sceptre:

Things are turning out quite well if I do say so myself. Although this is where things begin to get difficult. I've never been great at characters, and I have to make it in Maya by Wednesday, so less than a week. Not to mention the rendering coming out with some very weird results. I also have a presentation which is due either this Wednesday or the week after. Here I will be presenting my study of how visual themes effect the narrative of a game and pitch the idea for my dissertation.

By Thor's Hammer!

Just a quick update, unwrapped both weapons and started texturing the hammer now. All seems to be going well so far, and I'm enjoying the texturing a lot more now that I have my new Intuos 5!

So here is the hammer so far:

The black pattern is going to be normal mapped on it, it's just there as a place holder. There still isn't a spec map on it either, plenty more to do before this is finished.

I'm going to be moving on to Loki's sceptre soon, so I have a good basic texture for them before working on the details and I will have plenty to get feedback off during the tutorials on Monday.

Year 3

Well it's back to Uni next week, really looking forward to it although I am quite nervous, what with this year's grade is basically my final Uni grade...so yeah...no pressure...

Honestly though I can't wait to get back into it, summer has been a nice break but I really should get back to work now

In the past few days I completed a tutorial from Digital Tutors which came free on the CD that came with my 3D World mag. It was quite an interesting tutorial which focuses on the basics on unwrapping and texturing, but it has made me rethink may workflow and I was pleased with what I got...so it can't have been bad

This is the final image, the model was not done by me and was supplied with the tutorial, as were the photographic textures, the unwrapping and texturing (Diffuse and Ambient Occlusion) was done by me:

I think this turned out well for saying I consider myself to be a weak texture artist and I always rush through the unwrapping stage which makes texturing harder. So hopefully this will help me with my projects that start in under a week

More broken stone

So after completing the wall a few days back I was quite pleased with how it turned out and tried to do a similar thing with another model. I was going to sculpt the bricks for the end part of the wall I was making in conjunction with that one, but I'm not sure I could take carving away at more bricks yet...

Instead I made a few floor stones or stepping stones which were quick cuboids which I added some subdivisions to and then quickly moved them around to a more organic shape, I then took them into Mudbox and did the same as I did with the wall

Here are the results:


In Mudbox:

In 3ds Max as a normal map:

It 288 polys in the end for the low poly mesh with normal map on it, perhaps slightly high for what it is but it was just a quick exercise so isn't too bad. The things that look like folds near the corners of the stones is due to my bad unwrapping (surprise surprise) I could clean them up but for what its worth I'm just going to leave it

Theres no diffuse or spec on there, just the normal map

Wall!

Just a quick update from the wall from yesterdays blog post, set up the normal maps, but a quick diffuse and AO texture on it and sorted the spec out. Overall? I think it turned out quite well, take a look for yourself.

I think it looks best from front on, but then thats normal maps for you isn't it. It turned out to be 1532 polys, perhaps a little higher than I would have liked but it could be cut down if the brief required it, its quite flexable but it looks good at this level with a decently low poly count.

The top hasn't had any work done to it, and I would want to do something to that before I thought about using it in a game or submitting it for an assignment. I still have an end piece of wall which I was creating beside this that could be placed anywhere along the wall for more customisation during the map layout. And...come to think of it I saw this wall as being able to be placed side by side to make a longer wall, but I could have laid the stones out better and sorted the top out so it would connect better...isn't hindsight a wonderful thing...

Back to work!

So yeah....it's been a while peeps...

And erm...I haven't done much work tbh...I found the free time thing quite addicting and have been doing nothing but seeing my girlfriend, friends, family and playing games...

But its been fun!

I started getting back to work over the last few days, I started making a fairy character in preparation for next year university project, but that hasn't been going oh so well... I think jumping straight back into a character was a mistake, should have gone for a prop or weapon first really. I'll keep working on the fairy and see if I can get it to look half decent, then I'll post it up on here.

Other than that I started modelling a wall yesterday, and it went quite well... then I put it into mudbox and it went great...then I kept mudboxing it and I don't think I looks so good now, probably overworked it slightly. Either way here is the mudbox mesh, I have tested putting it into max on a low poly model as a normal map and it works fairly well, but I think with a bit of tweaking I can get it to look better, if I works well I'll stick that up here when i get round to it to...

anyway here it is in max before sculpting:

And here it is in mudbox after sculpting:

I think the stones towards the top of the wall work better than the ones at the bottom as I think I overdid the damage a bit too much but I wanted the damage to be more severe towards the bottom of the wall, like it has been hit a clipped by things passing it. Hopefully that came across in the sculpt.

FMX and Stuttgart

Hey everyone, it's been a week or so since my last post and that is because I have been in Germany for the FMX festival in Stuttgart. It was an amazing trip, a great laugh and really interesting, hopefully I will be able to make it again next year, money permitting, and I will be able to show my work off to industry professionals.

There was some really interesting talks I went to see, and many that I didn't get to make, the highlights included Building Creatures at Weta, the many John Carter talks about creatures and environments, Animating Reptiles presented by Stuart Sumida and the Mass Effect 3 Tech Art.

Manning the University of Glamorgan stall was also fun, I got to meet some really interesting people from many backgrounds and had a good few conversations with people, and while I wasn't talking to people I was either talking to other people manning the stall with me or spending it looking up information on unity for next years project.

But back to major project...I didn't get any work done over the FMX week as I didn't take it with me, I thought it would be too much hassle taking it there and back and I wasn't going to get much work done anyway, but that obviously adds much more stress on this final week, and I have plenty to do for the Friday submittal.

Since the last post I fixed the problem with the club mesh flashing, I only had to make a physics asset for some unknown reason but trying to find a solution to this took quite a while, but I made it and then wrote some script to reference the physics asset so that works now.

I have also been working on the textures for lots of the models after the 1st submittal feedback, I have pretty much started the club and crossbow textures from scratch, in some cases I think this worked but in other cases it has made it quite awkward to work such as changing the firing mechanism of the crossbow from wood to metal.

No pretty pictures this time I'm afraid, no time to work on that, but will be posting some of my turnarounds and screencaps on here as I create them for submittal

2 weeks to go....

And only one week of work time left...

Scary thought...

So the deadline is now 13 days away, and about 6 of them days are taken up with my FMX trip to Germany, so realistically I have 7 days left of work left on the project that I feel like I've been working on for years

The project is nearing an end (both in terms of the deadline and the production process) and I feel we've come quite far in the last 13 weeks, but I don't want to mess it up at the end so working hats on for double crunch time

Since the last post I had my feedback for the 1st submittal and while most of my work was not viewable due to an error with the video (most likely my fault during the rendering) I was able to get some really good, in depth feedback on my work, a lot of which was done over Easter which none of the tutors have seen yet. So it was nice to get a fresh view from them and it has opened my eyes to the errors of my work.

The feedback mostly consisted of my models being modelled too perfectly, with too many straight lines and everything looking like it was made in a factory, which is a very good point now I look at it as these are items made by Mongolian warriors and Ogres...

To remedy this I have gone back and edited a few of the models by only shifting around points so that I dont destroy the UV unwraps. This limits me a bit to the changes I can make but it also saves a lot of time, and time is something we don't have much of at this stage.

Here is the reworked campfire and weapon pickup points:

I also edited the UV unwraps and re-textured and viewport canvased it to get rid of the huge horrible seams it had on it.

And I have made the post on which the banner stands less straight, although I could not do too much with this as there were only a few edge loops on that part of the model:

It's a small change but I think it helps.

Another recurring theme in my feedback was that the colours were very flat, they sometimes had lighter and darker areas but they were all the same hue. This is another thing that I never noticed until it was pointed out to me, then it became obvious. So that is the other major change I am going to make over the next couple of weeks.

I have also added some more war paint to the Ogre. I was going to leave the paint as it was so it was more subtle than overpowering but because we can no longer make the teams into Mongolians and Ogres (due to me and Joe not fully understanding how to achieve this while also getting it to load my scripts) we are using the war paint as a team signifier. So Ogres on the red team have red war paint, and Ogres on the blue team have blue war paint.

On the same note the green cloth of the male Mongolian I modelled has now be changed to red and blue respectively. It is not the ideal scenario but as a quick and easy solution at the end of the assignment I think it works quite well.

Overall thought the feedback was good, I was told I had everything finished more or less, so I had nothing too big to worry about from now on, I just need to edit textures and models to make them look better and score extra marks, so that was encouraging to hear. And in terms of scripting and the like, I think I only need to find a way to remove the link gun on spawn and I will have finished messing with it and will leave it so I don't monumentally break everything in the last few days

On a side note, I just compiled my digital sketchbook for my Visual Forms hand it which is not until the 8th (or something near there) but I have had to complete it early as I will be in Germany then. I would have handed it in but the tutors still haven't put up a digital dropbox for them so I have handed them to Jess and she has agreed to submit them for me :)

3 day post streak!

This is now the 3rd day in a row where I believe I have enough work to warrant another blog post, which is great. Although I really don't think I'll be able to keep this up much longer, I'm starting to hit roadblocks now and works beginning to slow down.

Today I managed to update the flag texture somewhat. I added a bit of normal detail to the golden part as was my first intention, I did this by finding an image and then using it as a Mudbox stencil. I also wanted to add lots of cloth folds to the flag...but I didn't think it through when I upwrapped it and lay all of the flag pieces on top of each other meaning Mudbox cant render it out...ah well... lesson learned I guess.

Here's the flag now:

Its far from finished...but well...you get the picture.

I now have the crossbow firing arrows semi-correctly. The arrow mesh now points in the direction you are looking, so the arrow no longer comes out sideways, and it now travels at a more normal speed. I also rescaled the arrow so that it is more realistic compared to the crossbow and players. The problem at the moment is it has a wierd bug while flying through the air and I'm not entirely sure what's causing it. Either the mesh emitter is firing more than one mesh and it's confusing it or something is going wrong while rendering it and it's not showing correctly. I'm going to try and take a closer look at this soon by getting the AI to fire some arrows and trying to observe it from a different angle.

I would post a screenshot of the arrow going wrong but I could be here all day trying to get the timing right.

Another thing I have managed to figure out is the weird shadows being cast on the main tent. This was, as suspected, a lightmass unwrap issue. I just had to go back in and take the lightmass unwrap to more extremes and it seemed to do the trick. It took some time testing it every time I tweaked it though, as I had to rebuild the lighting in UDK which currently takes around 5 minutes.

And last but certainly not least...I managed to playtest it today, with bots running round and managed to make it a proper capture the flag game that the bots join in and play, which is great. I would love to have seen the smile on my face for the first 10 minutes of playing it until I realised I should probably actually be working. I screen recorded a video of the bots all running round playing capture the flag, the quality may not be particularly good on here but I'll be doing a better render sometime before Monday's deadline anyway.

There are no Ogres or Mongolians running around at the moment as I haven't added Joe's script files or USk packages into my UDK setup yet, but that will be easy enough to sort out, I'm just waiting for them to be completed. The weapons are not running yet either although I have re-done the script for the club now and the AI can use the weapons. (They can use the crossbow anyway, I'm yet to test the club but it's using almost identical code) I decided to leave the weapons out as they are currently firing lasers to determine impact and the club is long ranged and problems like that so I thought for the viewing it would just be better to use the UT3 weapons.

Tomorrow I will probably use most of my time trying to get the weapon scripts working how I want them too, just so I have some kind of working weapons for Monday's first submittal, but if I find I'm getting nowhere with it I'll get on with some texturing as a lot fo that still needs completing.

Update ALL THE DAYS!

It was only yesterday that I last posted a blog entry, and already I feel I should make another. For saying I didn't start work today until around 7:30pm I got a fair amount done.

First things first, I already figured out what was wrong with the UDK viewports...well I didn't actually find out what was wrong, but I found a fix. There is a menu arrow in the corner of the viewport which you can click on, then go to show, then return it to defaults. That seemed to do the trick.

The flag is now mostly sorted out, I have the cloth physics working on it, although part of it is wrapping round so I will have to check the skinning of that later. It has very minimal textures but all of the coding for it is already complete. I have a red and a blue flag, both implemented into the game and you can pick one up and carry it to the other flag to score points, so I effectively have a capture the flag game using my own flags now.

There's not much here I can show you in pictures as its mostly code work. But I can show you a picture of the flag. The opacity map is currently in progress and that's why the flags are only partly ripped.

As a bonus to this I made a custom flag base, so that it didn't use the very sci-fi style UT3 one. It's nothing special but it's rather small in the game and wont attract too much attention so I would rather spend my time on other objects.

This is the base, modelled, unwrapped and with a base texture on it:

Then finally, as I have the script sorted for the base too I can get the flag to spawn above the base and can be picked up and used as normal. Here's a screeny:

Interestingly it tries to apply the original UT3 texture to my mesh when you actually run the game. There is probably a texture override in the code somewhere that I haven't found yet but I'm sure that wont be too much of a problem.

The flag also sits at a 90 degree angle to the base, which in itself isn't too much of a problem but when a player picks the flag up it partly hangs in front of their face, which is annoying to say the least... but that will be a simple changing of co-ordinates in the code...I'm hoping...

Either way I seem to be getting the hang of the code now, and I'm able to edit it fairly fast without too much trouble. I feel like I could do anything with it at the moment, but then I keep looking at the weapon scripts and thinking maybe not... but we shall see...

As a final bonus though...

0 Errors and 0 Warnings! I've not seen that since I first started up UDK and now I'm managing to keep it this way, which is awesome.

I'm losing track on what's new now...

Its been around a week and a half since my last post... how bad of me...

Anyway, a few of the days of were spent on getting my essay done for contextual studies, I wrote it on the difference between Western and Eastern game titles and why they differ. It was quite a fun essay to write and research but I had some trouble getting quotes for it...I was pretty pleased with what I managed in the end though...probably one of my better essays...hopefully...

As the title suggests, I'm flicking between bits of work all over the place at the moment, trying to get everything finished of at least in a workable state before the 1st submittal this Friday... I highly doubt everything will be working as I want by then, as the weapon script is proving more difficult than I anticipated...but hopefully by the time the final submittal roles round they should be working...

I'm saying hopefully a lot, that probably isn't good...

But on to work!

I've solved the wall lighting issue where a seam would appear about 3/4 of the way up the mesh and it didn't seem to show on any texture maps. It was just a smoothing groups issue...the amount of times that catches me out... but that's all sorted now, and I even went back and made a slight improvements to the wall while I was there.

I got around the issue of not being able to fire inside the cave as I was using 2 landscapes to make the holes for the cave, as you cant make holes in the landscape as its still in early development. To get around this I just made a quick mesh in 3DS Max and then stole the UDK texture I was using on the other cliffs. It's by no means ideal and it still needs work, but it proved to be a fairly simple, quick fix so I'm not complaining.

I have rescripted the crossbow weapon using the UT3 shock rifle files and adjusting the code. I'm not going to post it all here because it is really long and in 5 or so separate files. But basically I have the weapon in UDK and you can fire it. Although at the moment the crossbow is held sideways, it shoots giant arrows that don't face the right way and lasers shoot out of it and explode people...so yeah, not finalised yet. But I know how to solve most of them problems, or can at least work it out, the only thing I'm unsure about it the mesh emitter which is used to fire the arrows...but if worst comes to worst I can just use a particle emitter and try to make it look like a fast arrow.

Here's the crossbow being held wrong:

Here's the arrow not flying correctly:

As an added weapon bonus, I have the club pickup working, kinda... It's rotating above the pickup point fine, but I think the scale is too big and the pivot is just too high so when he holds it you can only make out the bottom of the handle, but that should be an easy change now that I have it working in game.

I've also made a flag tonight, working from since I left Uni and went shopping, I have managed to model, unwrap and skin a flag that will replace the default UT3 flag. It is 1144 polys, so that works out at 2288 tris in UDK. I have only got base textures on the flag at the moment, but I have a red and blue flag made on the same texture map so the team colours will work. I have not yet set up the physics and cloth on the flag yet so it is only static, but it should flow like the banners do on my environment.

I've made the game a Capture the Flag game mode now...but that only involves changing the prefix to the map name, but I have the flag capture points in now, so it's a playable CTF game!

Hmm, other things I have done...I have tweaked little bits of textures here and there, adding a few spots of mud or rips to the materials. But nothing too major there. Oh, and I made some blocking volumes to keep players for getting out of the level, it is a bit of a cheap way of keeping them in, but it saves no end of time play testing all the ways someone could escape from the map and then tweaking the map again so I'm not complaining.

An interesting error I have come across, which is almost 100% a user error not a program error, is that I have seemed to hide all of the textures and materials as well as deleting and not showing new actor classes. I have tried flicking it though all the different viewing modes but cant seem to figure it out, which is interesting...Luckily it's not just my map, the base UDK ones are like it too and the textures load when you play it, so I hopefully haven't horribly destroyed it a few days before 1st submission...

Makes it look snowy which is cool, but if anyone knows what has caused this could you just drop me a message with a fix? I'm sure I'll figure it out soon enough but any time saved on this project is a massive help. Maybe I only need a computer restart or something...but hopefully it wont stick around and be a problem...

I just managed to get no errors or warnings while compiling the UDK scripts...so that's a nice little personal victory for me

I was writing this blog as I was working on my other screen and I'm just gob smacked at how fast I'm working at the moment, I cant keep up blogging with everything that's getting done, and that's a really good feeling

/Superlongblogpost

Caves and Script Changes

It's not been as long as usual since my last update but I'm going to try and update more often in smaller bites for the next few weeks as we're coming to the end of the project and there will be lots of changes and rushing about to come in the future, so here goes...

Possibly the biggest change I have made since the last update is texturing the cave. I have made a very quick diffuse map and quickly gone over it in Mudbox. I still need to improve it quite a bit but for how quick it was to make I think the results have turned out well.

There were a few problems with the unwrapping though, and that has continued to be a pain throughout the texturing of the cave, there are quite a few seams and they don't seem to be connecting well with the normal maps taken out of Mudbox. I seem to remember reading about a fix to this but to save time searching I manually went in with viewport canvas in 3DS Max to fill in the seams of the diffuse and normal maps.

I do intend to expand on this texture, adding unique parts to it in different rooms such as scratches or cave paintings, but that will most likely be a tweaking thing towards the end of the project. Here it is as it stands now though.

The cave itself was around 800 polys but I was getting some big smoothing issues, I applied meshsmooth to it which brought it up to around 3500 polys and I liked the result, plus it fixed my smoothing issues so I decided to keep it. The game still runs at about 33FPS while inside the cave as opposed to around 28FPS outside so the extra polys can be spared.

I have also added a few more of the rocks from outside in the cave to build on the walls as I intended to only build the outline of the cave in Max and then improve on it my adding rocks in UDK. Also doing it this way saves on memory as the rocks are already instanced in the scene so they do not take up as much memory as a brand new mesh.

I also thought that I would post the script for the weapons on here which I did a few weeks back incase anyone is interested in that or can point out any of the errors. I have them recognising the mesh in the game and have them doing damage when 'firing' but I have not yet set up the animations as I don't have them yet, and the meshes don't sit right in the 1st and 3rd person perspectives so I need to tweak the code to get them to sit right.

Here are the 2 files used to make the club work:

Here are the 2 that make the crossbow work:

And here is the bit of code that I changed in the script for the weapon pick up to change the static mesh to the one I have made:

All of the code there was taken from Epic's official UDK help pages at UDN and then edited to pick up my skeletal meshes and to have the amount of ammo and do the amount of damage ect that I want it to do in my game.

I have commented out (text in green) the animation sections for now as I don't have the animation files but I will fix them as soon as possible.

I intend to get the weapons working correctly in the next couple of weeks before the 1st submittal deadline, although that will probably be without the animations. Hopefully I can get that done and we will have a finished looking game ready to show by then, even if it will need quite a bit of tweaking.

So much for shorter blog posts....