It's starting to come together!

Been just over a week since the last update, kept meaning to do it but I never had the time. But I do now!

So where to start...lets have a screenshot of the environment so far

Its looking pretty good now... If I do say so myself... better than I could see it being a few weeks ago anyway. The biggest change since last time must be the cave, it's only a model at the moment and its in the stage of unwrapping (which is being a pain) but I will hopefully have that mudboxed and textured soon.

As the landscaping tools I used in UDK are still in their infancy it does not yet have the ability it but holes in it for the cave, so I have made a second landscape over the top of it, although this comes with a few problems...firstly the shadows seem to be messing up on the hills, not entirely sure why. Secondly when stood underneath the 2nd landscape all bullets seem to disappear...

The trees and rocks that have been added are just UDK base meshes that I'm using as I don't have the time to model all of the rocks and foliage as well as everything else. I did have to make a collision mesh for one of the trees and all the rocks but they only took a short amount of time.

There's banners outside the Mongol camp and the Ogre cave now. I didn't intend to make them in pre production but I was getting a lot of feedback saying the environment needed more colour so it seemed like a fun way to add a bit of variety.

There is also some torches in the scene now, although they have only been very basically textured. They have the same fire effect as the campfire that have just been scaled down slightly.

Anyway, enough of the text, more pictures are needed! This is a picture of the banner that's outside the Mongol camp, it is a skeletal mesh meaning it can be animated, and its using cloth physics on the flag, I was going to record a video of it flapping in the wind but it's not screen recording very well...either way it works...

And here is the one outside the Ogre cave:

As a side note the textures have been updated since these screenshots and I have used an opacity map to give it a frayed and damaged look.

Up next is the torch:

Like I said, the cave and the torches are not properly textured yet, but you get the point. The firs is above the torches and a separate light just in front of the mesh gives the cave its lighting. When I tried to add some of the lights on the torches in the Mongol camp it broke the world lighting so I will probably leave them as unlit torches, but the ones in the cave work and they are the important ones.

Next... some puddles...

I've added a plane of water to the environment but placed it so it only leaves puddles rather than swim-able water. There are multiple puddles in the cave (you might struggle to see them but once the cave is textured they will stand out more) and a large puddle outside the cave.

Finally, and least impressively...
I gave the Ogre a bit of war paint, more to come...

But it feels like a good amount of work for a week and a half-ish and I'm still getting lots of free time while I'm home! Now I just need to start finallising everything so it looks more polished and write my critical studies essay...but it's looking good so far!

/optimism