19 / 11 / 2010 Post Alpha Presentation Recap and Final Asset creation phase

Ok, so we are now past the Alpha presentation stage in this project and have a clear idea in which direction everything needs to take now. Although I am not as far as I would like to be in this project which has been noted and will push me harder to get everything done as soon as, but I do feel that the presentation to my peers went as well as it could. I focused on explaining what phase I am at now, the issues that I have been facing, if I am following the project time scale and what needs to be done before everything is completed in a number of weeks time. I made sure to explain the problems that I have been having and which have been the reason for being a little behind shedule, one of the major factors was lack of knowledge in UDK.

In the last few weeks I've picked up my pace in UDK and started to get used to how it all works which means my work flow has sped up a great deal. Watching the UDK tutorials on lighting from Eat3D (mentioned in my last blog post) has helped give me an understanding of lighting, light maps and lightmass. A general lighting blockout has been made for the level now, which gives a general idea of how it will play out but the basic colours applied to the geometry I feel is incorrect which doesn't do justice to the lighting system. As assets now start to get textured and inserted in to the level, I know now to make everything look a lot more grey / metalic rather than blue. This mistake could have saved me a lot of time as instead of blocking the colour out I might have texutred everything first in that colour... which would have screwed things up big time.

Here are a few updated images of where the level is at the minute that was shown at the Alpha event:

Beatuy Shot # 1

This image here is the first official beauty shot of the environment (although a fly through is also now planned for the level). You can see the basic lighting blockout to get a general feel of how the level might feel though the blockout colours are wrong.

Beauty Shot # 2:

A more panaromic shot which is aimed to show off the centre area and also the window in to the Clean room. The bounce lights coming off the link machines though is working rather well.

Beauty Shot # 3:

The clean room is a little bare at the current stage and needs to be worked on a lot more. Currently most things aren't that accurate and are still blockouts but I am confident that it shouldn't take too long to get this room done.

An example of the computer screens and how the finals could look once they are in the environment. Hopefully I should be able to get emissive lighting to work with them which should really boost the environment!

An example of an emissive lighting problem where it was applied to one of the lights above the window and caused this... As you can see it flooded the environment with blue light and caused the lightmaps in the clean room to screw up.

Now is the time for things to crack on get things done and so I have started to create the final assets and getting them in to the game. To begin with I have constructed the canopy type object covering the central area and my aim of getting it done as soon as possible. In the end I mamanged to get it done in less than half a day, including building a high-poly to bake down on to the low poly. All that needs to be done now is texture that asset but I'm going to wait until I have the whole central area modelled and normalled first so I get a consistant texture style going.

Here is what I have done so far:

High Polygon creation of the canopy over the central section. Time take: 1.5 hours max

Low Polygon creation with baked normals / occlusion. Note there are some errors with the AO / normals but these can be ironed out in photoshop. It is actually just a quarter of this piece but I have duplicated it around so you can get an idea of how it will look. This is to optimise the maximum amount of UV space and light maps. Time taken: 30 minutes - 1 hour (taking bake times in to consideration).

I now know it will be quite to get these assets done and into the environment so my aim is to get everything done as soon as possible so I can play around with things later.

As for now I am away for the weekend and will pick things back up for an intense session on Monday!

Thanks for looking!