I spent the week modifying textures and updating sheets to use more udk friendly setups.

The buddha head got a texture update, still not happy with it but its getting closer, also started working on the chair area including blocking in colours for the Kart and working on the huge copper disk lights.

Now games dev is out of the way for a bit and I have spent some time catching up on concept art I hope to finally get my head in the game for this, hopefully I will have something nice to show for Animex!

Next steps – Finish off the circular wall pieces, build a little pot for the level, texture up the large concrete piece behind the chair.

This week I have been working on Tweaks and fixes for the pieces of the scene already created, as well as starting on one of the more complex pieces in the scene. I felt it was a central part and deserves some time and attention so it has been started early so it can be brough up a long with the rest of the assets in the scene as parts are tweaked.

All textures have had their alpha channel removed and are now sitting at half the memory usage. All other single channel textures have been grouped together using seperate channels on rgb textures in an attempt to maximise efficiency.

Specular has been re-enabled on everything, running the editor in dx11 with image based lighting on disables spec. As there are no image reflection actors within the scene this means they come off as dull.

I have been shown the correct way of using gloss maps within UDK by Andy, now they all work and I can tweak them later down the line very quickly and easily if required. (yay)

Most textures levels have been sorted to get better results from compression and hopefully reduce value clipping.

And I have worked on adding a couple more assets into the scene but the head has taken up most of the last couple of days.

Thanks 🙂

I have been working on getting assets into udk and did my first test with emmissive lighting, I think they need a tweak in both colour and bloom so I can get the correct glow and green coming off them.

A lot of time has been spent setting up lightmaps for use in unreal and a few more assets are ready for full construction. Unfortunatly I got no where near as much done over christmas as should have been done so now playing catchup (Lots of catch up)

I think next step to help fill the scene out would be the ceiling, then the lighting can start to be tested so that materials can be brought closer to a final look I am happy with.

I recently got my hands on the Blueray for Total Recall, I Will be using it to adjust my blockout within max with the new angles the movie provides.

I also ran into some issues with shading errors inside of max, marmoset toolbag and UDK, I decided to experiment with editing the vertex normals of the object, I ended up averaging the 4 sides individually to flatten them down.
This edit meant I had to re bake the normals in Xnormal as they no longer matched with the normal map bake.
The edited vertex model displayed much more cleanly in marmoset and max, but I was unable to get these into udk, in the end I used the simplygon tool to get udk to edit its own normals, this seemed to work very well and I ended up with a similar result to the other programs with only a minor rise in vertex count with the new breaks.

The left side is my averaged normals within 3Ds Max, middle is the default import into UDK and on the right is the Simplygon edit.

I think all of this was caused by an issue within max where editing the vertex normals on a model at any point causes it to ignore your smoothing groups, it seems a fix is to run it through the smooth modifier, this fixes the export to Udk, one of my biggest bug bears.

Decided to test the finished mesh and textures in the 2 engines I am thinking of using for the project, Cryengine 3 and UDK, I think if I was doing an exterior area Cryengine would take it by a landslide, but I am not, so a lot of the advantages of the engine are lost.

I have also started work on a couple of the medical pieces surrounding the chair, here is the “Mind Trip Reader” alongside the current pillar. It still needs a lot of more subtle work on it and a gloss map to help sell the material types.