Sunday 21 April 2013

Prop and texture improvements


As the final hand in was quickly approaching I needed to really increase the amount of ruin and mess that was on the floor. I began to pose the skeletons I had created into crumpled positions on the floor which I could then scatter around the level as corpses. I created some variations by positioning the bones and started placing them around the level and also built a corpse pile out of them which began to make the level look a lot more filled and less spacious.

Maya Corpse variations

Corpses scattered around the level

I felt like a lot of my models textures were looking bare and dull in comparison to the stone texture I had made so I updated some of my textures and also quickly created some normal maps for them using the xNormal plug-in. This greatly improved the look of my scene and I was really beginning to grow proud of it.

Updated props
Updated props

The final tweaks to my level that I made were lighting changes to better replicate the original image reference and also vertex painting to add some variation on my models. To do this I created another tiling texture and then set this up in my master material which then allowed me to vertex paint on my meshes.

Lighting added to surrounding walls
Vertex painting on static meshes
Master stone tiled material with vertex painting parameters added

Saturday 20 April 2013

Stone material and runes update


In particular I have focused on my stone material and getting the runes onto the walls of my scene. To do this I used the xNormal plugin in Photoshop to create the normal map for the runes which I created by downloading a font and then typed out some of my blog as an Easter egg for the scene.
I then overlayed the normal maps together which I could then apply to the parameters of my material instances. I also managed to get some nice results from the specular maps as well. I ended up with a really nice stone material which I was really proud of.

Wall normal map with runes overlaying the cracks

Runes added to the walls
Another thing I did was lowered the Ambient occlusion maps which I had applied to my material instances. As well as doing this, I applied the normal maps from my high poly models to the material instance parameters and immediately began to see some changes in my material definition. The normal and specular maps were also working very well in bring out the detail of the cracks and damages on the pillars.

Normal and specular maps bringing out the damages on the pillars


Friday 12 April 2013

Easter break catch up and alpha presentation


During the Easter break I spent a lot of time catching up. I had fallen behind when optimising my low poly models as I had created so many variations which I had to each UV layout for bake tests. However by the time the alpha presentation came around I was feeling a little more optimistic about my level. I had created another high poly asset which was meant to be the huge structural damaged hole in the back wall. Although I had some issues with UDK not getting the most out of my normal map it did help to add a greater scope of depth to the level.

Back wall structural damage
As we are now in week 9 I presented my alpha presentation. These are the slides as well as my alpha cinematic of my scene.



Over these two slides I recapped what scene I had been working on.


I then showed some images of some of the focal points of my scene as well as some establishing shots which I had been focusing on. I then played my alpha cinematic.



My next slide covered some of the challenges I had faced, in particular scaling the level out as well as finding the balance for my geometry and my normal maps.


Next I explained what I had left to do and what in particular I wanted to focus on.



At the end of my slide I answered some questions about my progress and how I was going to complete my remaining focuses. The presentation itself went quite well I think. I didn’t receive any negative feedback and similar to my block out presentation, I was more offered advice on how to complete certain aspects and things to focus on.