A change of colour

I always go for warm, orange colours in pretty much all my work. I love sunsets and sunrises but I think what really brings this scene out is the daylight colours. If I was to texture this then I would make it like it is in the reference picture, well more dirty, rusty and old, but the same base colours, and that itself would tint my room yellow/orange.

Anyway, I like these new renders so I though I would share them.

"I'll be back"

I went back to the arm because it was bugging me, and I managed to get it down to just under 5k polys but at the same time I tidied it up and added some more detail, so I'm happy. If I knew how to bake normals better then I could easily get it down to 4k, but I can't and it's no biggie.

Busy Busy Workers

Ok I've pretty much finished the worker arms, they could do with a bit of optimization and improvements in places, such as the turner wheel at the back, there isn't enough sides so it looks really jagged rather than smooth.

At the moment, these arms are coming in at 5.1k polys, a lot more then I really want. If I can bring them down to 4k I'll be happy, 3k and I'll be chuffed to say the least. Saying that though, these will be split into 2 or 3 so I can have them damaged or broken, so it shouldn't be too bad, especially if I can occlude some.

Over 100,000.....

Polys, 200,000 tri's without any optimization, but it's gonna be even more then that as I have some N-Gons in there too :(

Started work on one of the worker arms today, should have it finished tomorrow, and there is gonna be 4 of these which is gonna put another bump in my poly count! There is also another 2 arms I need to make, but I can't see where they originate from in the pic so that's gonna be guess work. Then there is the train and after that it's pretty much just deco and adding more of my own stuff. I think the plan for me is to try and occlude as much of the room as possible to keep frame rates up. Luckily, the whole theme of my game dictates I can have rubble and other obstructions dotted around the room. There isn't any glass and most of the metal is dirty and rusty, so that's gonna bump my frame rate up even more as I don't have to worry about reflections or transparency issues.

I would love to be able to texture this, or get someone to do it for me, but I really don't think that's gonna happen. We'll see anyway, I should have this room finished in a week or two, hopefully before I go back to uni.

Back to Colour

The Ambient Occlusion render was nice, but in all fairness, it doesn't really show the right level of detail for a project like this, well not at the moment anyway. Something that is really detailed, with nooks and crannys, extruded edges everywhere etc, then it comes into a class of it's own, but for now I think I'll just stick with normal rendering.

Ze Ambient Effect

A few more shots.

Shelling out

To make sure I can work on the scale of the room more, I've built the core structure, or the shell in which everything will fit.

Coffee > Hangover

I woke up this morning feeling a bit groggy and not really in the mood for doing any work. 3 Coffees later I was buzzing through my project. I feel like I really should spend more time on the group project, but between working with Actionscript and working with UDK/GoW and 3DS max it's an obvious choice which one I'm gonna do. I really feel this third year has been an anti-climax so far. I was hoping to do 2-3 projects in the Unreal Engine so I would have a solid portfolio to show as soon as I leave uni. Instead we've been tasked with creating a game in Flash....

I can understand the brief, and I know that I aren't always going to be able to do stuff I want to work on, but if this project had been one that you do yourself instead of working in a group, I would have adapted it to work with the Unreal Engine. It wouldn't of had to have been a FPS, I've seen a lot of cool ideas and I wouldn't have even had to make a fully working game. When you compare our work with what the lower years, and even some of the past students have done, it all seems a bit lackluster. I would have given my arm and leg to work on this Dock project that the current year 2's are doing, instead, again, we were stuck with working with Flash creating a half arsed project in a group of 7.

Anyway, enough about my rant! There's time for that at the student rep meeting. Here's my current update, I'll work on it again tomorrow if I have time.

 

 

19k

OVER9000!!!! (polys)

I'm currently sitting at the 16k mark for polygons, which isn't too bad I don't think, especially considering how many cylindrical shapes are in the scene. I'm guessing so far, out of all the object I've created, it'll work out to be 4 different assets that can by instanced in unreal. These are instanced quite a bit so that's a big plus and gives me more confidence to add a few more polys in.

I have no idea what I'm gonna do for texturing. I might just save myself the hassle and import them into UDK as they are, with just blank textures on. I really like the look of the grey and red, and it would look better then half arsed, not matching, crappy textures that I make!

Update on train factory

Train Factory

I haven't quite finished my other assets yet, but I don't think there is any harm in starting this room now. The picture I linked a few days back, of the train factory, will be something that I'm going to try to recreate and have as a small level in the new UDK. I'll try and make it an exciting level, maybe have a bit of exploration then a frantic firefight in an arena style, where you just have to fight off waves after wave. I'll try and make use of as many of the assets available to me in the UDK as I can and to do this I'll make it really run down and at night. Then I can have interactive dynamic lighting, overgrown plants and grass which can take use of the new interactive foliage system implemented in the December build of UDK. I'll try and make assets movable in the game and this has just come to me but perhaps I'll try and let the player 'build' his own defence.

For example, I could have a message pop up saying "You can hear noises coming from the East". I'll then give the player 30 seconds to re-arrange the layout of the level using interactive switches etc to suit an assault from the East. Although it may not have a massive effect in UDK, if this was possible in GoW (which is is in the second GoW because they have moveable cover in the form of rock worms) I would change the cover points each time the player changed the level, offering a new and fun type of gameplay.

Anyway, here's my start. Nothing amazing I know!

A living nightmare

Seriously, my nightmares are just UV's coming to attack me. How the hell anyone textures, let alone has fun doing it is beyond me. Anyway, I'm working at it, even though it's depressing to do lol. This is where I am so far, I wanted to bring it into UT3 because I'm not sure how to add normal maps to 3DS Max and it just looked so flat.

Edit: After looking at these pictures, it looks like the main part could perhaps do with the texture being bumped up to 1024, it's currently 512x512.

My room

After talking with J about my water material, we came to the conclusion that it just detracts too much from my FMP and it should really just be stuck in my online portfolio. So, after looking around for ideas on what to do, I came across this portfolio: http://steelbug.cgsociety.org/gallery/671864/ , belonging to Vladimir Kufeld. I found his portfolio on the Autodesk 3D Studio max homepage, and straight away I loved it!

I'm going to have a go at recreating his Train Factory piece in 3D and bring it in UDK. This can be a section of the game that I never got to add in while at the same time testing out what I can do with UDK. I think it fits in with my project and it has a steampunk feel. Also, the best thing about it is that I can pretty much have sloppy texturing, which I'm crap at, because it's pretty much all paint and steel. /Cheer

Steam Powered Cough Syrup

I'm feeling a bit better now and have managed to do some more work. I've just been working on my steam contraption a bit more, it'll most probably be linked to some sort of house or building, maybe as a power generator or something more bizarre. It's about 9k polys atm, which needs to be brought down, but saying that, It can already be split into 2-3 parts atm, and I think I'm too worried about how many polys I'm bringing into the engine. This is 2009 not 1999, 10k polys isn't really a big deal any more.

Edit: Looking over my post, I've realised the bottom pipe has far too many polygons, I must have forgotten to bring down the interpolation, that's a spare 100 polys right there! Hurray!

Illness strikes

As with my other projects, I've been ill this last week and everytime I try and do anything I come up aganst a brick wall. I'm finding it real hard to concentrate let alone come up with anything new. Anyway, after looking around at some reference images I've decided to model a steampunk esque structure. I really need to make a lot of these by the time I finish my level because although GoW does have a lot of Gothic buildings, they still don't scream out steampunk in the way that I want.

MEIN EYES!

Ok, I really don't have much time to work on the material in the upcoming weeks, I have some other projects which need my attention, especially our client brief because that's due in January. Anyway, I got rid of the stupid blue colour and I made the coat line more opaque plus a few other changes. There's a few more things I want to do to it such as change the opacity around the edges from 128 units to perhaps just 64, then maybe lower the opacity a bit. The rest of the changes I can't really do without actually building my map.

Ohhhhh, shiny

I made one massive mistake on my last upload of the water material I'm creating and that was forgetting to enable "accept lights". This gave it the flat and dull look it had. The normal maps wouldn't of worked and neither would the specular. This time I've enabled them and done a lot more tweaking. I still think the waters too blue, but it's still a W.I.P

Rainnnnnnnnnnnn

I think I love playing with materials in UT, but even more then that, I love playing with wet things (and wet things in UT). I added the rain, and although I'm not completly happy because theres patches on the floor when you look down where it's not raining because of the way the rain is cut out into squares, I think it looks really good and gives it a great atmosphere. Again, there is no lightning and I still haven't finished laying out this area, let alone the rest of it.

What a water success!

Finally, after spending ages on trying to figure out how to give the water some 3 dimensional life apart from a flat normal map, I've done it. I had some help from KazeoHin and Scruffy from the UDK forum and they helped me with the WorldPositionOffset node, which offsets the material in 3D space but keeps the object stationary.

It's still not finished though, it is too transparent in some places and it has no "coast" line. But, I'm very happy with the progress and I'll be adapting this for my FMP extra map.

Edit: New version up which has fixed the transparancy issues, I still need to add the mini-coast line and maybe change the colour, it all depends on the final surrounding.

Water, Water, Everywhere.

This isn't to do with Artus per se, but for my final major project, to show that I can also work in UDK as efficiently, I'll be making a small extra map, sort of like a tech demo. Valve did something similar with a small game they brought out, I can't remember the name now, but the showed of HDRI lighting and a few other things.

So anyway, I made this water which is to be used as an Oasis water material for this other mod I'm doing outside uni. The textures are also my own work, the lighting effect however is Jerc's and with his permission I'll be using that for the tech demo. My idea is to have a desert island, the kind of islands you see in those cartoons where it's a small island, maybe a raft, a coconut tree, all in all about 10ft squared, something tiny. I'll be having seagulls, fish in the water etc done by uScript, it should be fun.

Anyway, here's what I've done so far.

And the material:

/Old Search - 'Railway'

I've been really busy this last week putting my other projects on the back seat, which really isn't the best idea as my other projects are in first. I don't really want to put shots up of the game on here yet mainly because without lighting you can see anything, and screenshots in unlit are awful.

Anyway, I'm determined to finish off my railway that I started so long ago now, tonight I finished off the stairs. The bump maps fine except along the edges of the steps, so I may look over that again and just edit it in photoshop. I always say this, but I really hate texturing!!!

The return of Flash Gordon (Ahhhh Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh)

I've got my lightning working in GoW now, and although this image doesn't really give it justice, when the lightning strikes and you hear the thunder with the lighting bloom, it really does give a spine tingling feeling. I'll probably have a go at making some lightning in the particle editor once I've read more into beam emitters in the book.

I had to change it from one light to 4 though because I needed shadows so the inside didn't light up. The four lights are at a 25 degree angle on 90 degree iterations. This also gives a nice effect as you can see in the image above, where there is still some nice shadow depth underneath the roof. When I get closer to the end, I'll add a lot of point lights in the game to represent the indirect bounces of the lightning, as of right now the lightning enters the doorway of the building but inside it stays dark, this wouldn't happen. I think I'll use the lighting as the primary source of lightning and mood for the level.

It Lives!!

Before I start, I want to say this is miles  from being finished, so don't be getting ideas. I think I'll be working on the map until around January/February time, after then it's all scripting, effects, extra 3D assets etc. This is the area just after you start, the place you start is in the railway station which I still need to texture and bring in. I'm going to wait to bring in my assets though because I had a problem of not being able to delete anything in my map and every time I saved it crashed, which left me the only option of starting again, which I'm glad I did.

Anyway, in the final scene, this will be darker although I'm going to make sure the player can still see. It will be raining and thundering. This will also be the area of your first encounter against some COG bots.

Initial Planning

Every time I tried to draw out the level I'm designing it just went to shit. I'm so bad at drawing it's unbelieveable, and it puts me of wanting to work on it. So instead I decided to create a quick sketch in 3D and use that as a template for my level. So today I've just been drafting out the start of my level, it starts on the railway and you work your way into the government building. here you kill a few people, find an NPC who's nearly dead who tells you a bit about yourself and what's going on. You work your way to the back and find a hole in the wall. I'll probably add a cinematic when the player gets to this room of the camera going out the hole in the wall and giving a look over the city all burning and what not.

Here are a few of the images.

I see a sea

I've been working on this for about 5 hours now and I'm pretty impressed with the result I've got considering I did it all myself. It's still not finished, I want to try and add some foam to the edge, some sparkles, change the suns location and fade it out...A LOT. After that I think it'll be done. I won't be using this in project Artus, firstly it's far too much of a resource whore, secondly, GoW would throw a super benny if it caught me trying to bring this into it. It's such a badly designed engine and it crashes even when doing simple materials. I will use this for my other level I'm creating in UDK though, I think it will look really good. Probably a desert island.

Edit: I tried uploading a video, but every piece of software I downloaded was a bag of wank. Fraps seemed to record only a tiny screen and  CamStudio made it looks like the sea from Monkey Island.