POST 121! The final one!

Before I down this bottle of Southern Comfort sat here, just teasing and mocking me, I need to upload my final post. This is my self evaluation of the work done through my final major project.

Art Us Eval

Appendices:
Work I have been doing along side my FMP. This is where I got a lot of my experience from to transfer into my FMP: http://piranhi.com/nibbles/

Learning Z-Brush modelling: http://project-artus.blogspot.com/2010/03/zbrush.html

I would like to thank everyone from the Gears of War and UDK forums for giving me some great help over the past year. I would also like to thank the guys on my course and everyone else who helped with testing and feedback.

Done, Done, Done!

Game......Check
Design Document.....Check
Evaluation.....Check

The end of uni is in sight, I've just finished my final major project, all I have left is the degree show and already I have some interviews lined up, two with Codemasters which is just awesome! I'll upload my evaluation tonight or tomorrow and then I can relax in the last couple of days while everyone else panics. Sounds good :)

Final Updates: 1

The final moments

OK, so time to cram as much as I can in the next 2 weeks into finishing off my FMP. The game is pretty much finished, my design document is about 50% finished. I just need to start drawing some pictures, making diagrams, plans, screen shots, ideas, etc. I then wouldn't mind polishing up my game just a tiny bit more as well, now that finally, I have a working computer and I can use Kismet without having a stroke from anger.

I also changed my intro screen and changed the kismet a bit. This Kismet is Pre-tidyup, so it's a right mess, even I'm getting confused lol

UDK - The Final Frontier

In between my FMP and working on Archasis, I've been trying a few things out. I did a quick Elf level and now I'm testing out shaders to see what I can come up with.

This is what I got:

I should be able to use what I've learnt here in Artus, if it doesn't crash every two minutes...

Other work

Some other work I'm currently doing:

It's a material life

I've become very comfortable working with Materials lately and I've moved on a long way from my water material, I still shudder when I remember my first attempt lol. I made a 'Tron' bridge the other day which gave off some really cool lighting effects, and today I figured out how to pan a texture down the Z no matter what the objects orientation in world space or how the UV's are laid out. It's only a small setup, but it helps me achieve some of the effects I've wanted for a long time and it's taken me 2 days to try and figure out. I spent yesterday trying to work out how ObjectOrientation works in the material editor, but I just couldn't get anything out of it, my guess is it's not fully implemented yet as it has no documentation. The only colour I could get out was the Blue (Z) which didn't help.
Today I took a different direction and worked with WorldPosition more. Playing around with it I managed to get the texture to pan, but it centred from the centre of the object, after some more fiddling, I figured out how to get the texture to pan completely down the Z. Now this might not looks brilliant for all textures as it can cause some stretching, but for what I want it's perfect, even the stretching works. Win Win.

Zbrush

I've been building up the list of programs that I can use for my portfolio this past week or 2, this week I've been working in Zbrush. I've tried it on and off a few time over the last few years and I could never get it to work. I always thought you needed to be some crazy good artist to be able to make the cool stencils I've seen used, but I was wrong, in fact, it's quite easy for people like me, who can't draw, to make some cool stuff.

This is my first real go at making something on my own. In Z-Brush this was around 1.4million polygons, then I applied it to a pillar which was only 258 polygons.

Finished Product:

Lighting and Texels only:

Z-Brush Model:

Not amazing, but I wouldn't say it's that bad for my first model. I'm looking forward to using this more now. Especially as I also just found UV Master, finally... \o/

A wee bit more.

As my FMP is coming to a close, I'm taking this opportunity to work on my other map, which conincidentally can also be included in my FMP. I've already thought of a story for why this map should be in the game, but it's only in the early draft phase.

Blade vs UDK

I was looking on Eat3D a few months back, and I was blown away some of the videos they had on there. They were £60 to buy so I thought with my next loan I'll buy them, but everytime I got some money in I always had some other crap to buy. So I never go round to buying the discs, although I would still like to in the future.

So for the past few months I've been trying to work out how they got their dissolve effect, I just couldn't work it out. But last night, or this morning, it was early anyway, I had a Eureka moment as I was just getting to sleep. I whacked open my laptop and had a fiddle about, it kind of worked, but it wasn't brilliant. So this morning I had another go and BAM, I got the effect I wanted so long ago. As far as I'm concerned it's just as good as the Eat3D's one, and I have potentially saved myself £60 while also having an ego boost.

Night Time

So my church, which acts as my HUB level, goes through day and night cycles. In the actual game, it would be dynamic and change in regards to what has happened in the game, choices you've made, characters that have died etc. If I have time, I'll be wrecking the night time version of the church level as the night edition is meant to be the last time you're at the church and it's meant to look worn and torn. Anyway, I stripped all the lighting out, modelled some candle sticks and then redid it all. Changed the post processing, added some extra particle systems and changed the sound effects to go with it.

Why take the stairs when you....

 Stairs

Finally got round to importing my stairs, in fact, I made these stairs about 6 months ago and they were one of the first things into my level, but they were just there as a placeholder. I decided I would sort them out today so I cut them in half, optimized them and then textured them. I'm still not brilliant at texturing, but it really does make them stand out now, especially with the lighting I have. As I was just using the last ones as a placeholder, I never even thought to check the model, turns out it was 6000 polys and just 1 massive object, not overly complex, but far more then I wanted and it was probably causing a bit of lag. I've now got them down to 2x700 poly models so the occlusion can work it's magic again.

Bridge

I also go round to bringing my bridge in. It was originally for a different design of the level so I need to try and fit it in without breaking the scene I have atm.

1 Month absence, oops.

It's been a while since I posted about my FMP...well a month really. I just got fed up with it, but the editor especially. Fed up of BSOD's and crashes. Anyway, after my little break using UDK, I'm back now with a few more ideas. Last week I spent on my design doc, this week I've been tidying up my map, adding things here and there and today I've pretty much been solely working on Post Processing. I learnt a few tricks from a map I downloaded last week and it really helps the level to "pop".

I also think this picture is a showcase picture for my game, something about it I love. It almost gets the whole story and undertones of grief and misery across instantly.

Edit: The picture before was far too dark, even though it looked good with the flashlight. Some more playing about got me:

Whoops

Well, turns out there was something wrong with my copy of UDK, reinstalled it and everything works now. I also forgot to include everything inside the lightmass importance volume, which is why the new building looked quite dark. Anyway, I've brought the level of lightmaps down just while I'm working on it as building is taking quite a long time now.

Here are the latest images: