Next Stage of Development

The focus on this level has been neglected this week for other assignments. However I have been investigating problematic areas and studying tutorials of level design. These tutorials have demonstrated cheap and easy ways to separate noticeable tiling textures using alphas along the surface. Problems that still persist are my God Rays. I still do not understand why they do not work. The editor preview of the level displays but in game hides them. I posted a few posts of forums, had a few answers back on UDK’s official Forums and hadn’t received a reply that could fix the problem. Feedback received was stuff I have already tried like toggling with the global illumination, and world info.

After a few pieces of feedback it has come to my attention to edit the layout of my level. Try and change the level from a box to something more interesting a dynamic. I had already noted this earlier on and started creating new meshes that act as rooms. This hides more of the main walls surface and gives the illusion of other areas. But this doesn’t fix the illusion of square room. After looking deeply into unreal’s level I have noticed a good use of BSP’s is for areas such as my own level. For hallways, large box type areas. If I am to reedit my environment mesh I will do so by recreating it all with BSP for more control and quicker results.

As the holiday is approaching I really want to now start editing all my textures and models. My plan from the start was not to spend too much time in creating props and textures for the alpha presentation. Now I have gained that time I have the ability to edit, improve and just really experiment with design. Some Zbrush sculpturing would be nice in some models like my pillars. I would like to have a few slashes from dinosaur claws etc.

These last few weeks the level has started to be neglected towards other assignments but I have made the time to do so. Still 100% confident in finishing this level to all my potential.

Week 9: Slow progression, a week of tutorials, practice, optimising & re-design

Optimisation

A large portion of this week has been slowly optimising my level. I mean the term slowly because I am experimenting in ways to reduce texture sizes without losing the quality of my level. I have noticed my overall performance on my home computer starting to drop in frame rate. At University how ever there is no loss in performance. Although considering the criteria my level is at this moment perfectly suitable for hand in as the map will be tested on the university machines. I would like to take the practical approach and really try and optimise this map well enough that even my computer handles it well. A large portion of my poly count rendered in each frame was taken up by thousands of leaves which had been scattered around using the foliage factory volume. 6 polygons each leaf was and for the level of detail was too many. It made sense to just reuse the texture on the floor that the leaves rested on and re-use the leaf texture on the floor texture. This way no need for millions of alphas, and large portion of poly’s will be cut out of the scene.

Tutorials

I believe I’m at a stage now to give some life to my environment and start adding the extra elements that create some realism to scene. Things like introducing particle effects like steam coming from those many hundreds of pipes I have. Decals for adding some grime and dirt in areas. At the moment my new textures that applied to my alpha version of my map were a bit clean in areas. Using decals I will have full control where dirt can be applied.

Most of my research of Unreal has come from this very website, very useful step by step process and explanation

http://www.hourences.com/tutorials/

Re-design

It struck me whilst game testing my map that the layout needs to be toyed about. Game testing with unreal tournament playability is miss-leading because of its very fast action paced style of game play. My inspiration of the creation of this level was Gears of War. A more tactical slower approach but with more dimension. I know the assessment criteria are to be marked by the screenshots taken at the end of development. But at least when I take my screenshots, even if they are quite different to the movie screenshots, at least there will be a big reasoning behind it all.

 I re-designed my map into Gears of War. The development inside Gears of War Editor is slightly different in areas such as the scaling. Everything had to be scaled up x2. This was a problem for the import of my environment. Instead I built the environment all out of BSP which actually works a lot better than my current scene. Have a lot more playability; control of textures and the setup is so much easier. I’m thinking of using this method in my current level.

 In this re innovative approach to my map I decided to make the environment a lot larger, I feel at present my UDK version is relatively small, some of my scaling is defiantly off and I believe my gears of war version fixes that. Rebuilding this level helped highlight points, more importantly it allowed me to make drastic changes without affecting anything in UDK. Testing the game play and implementing AI provides a lot more depth to Unreal’s Game play testing. This version however is only basic, does not contain proper lighting, all my props and full layout as it’s not important.

Week 8 – Alpha Presentation, Massive Progression

In preparation for my alpha presentation I put all my remaining time and effort into showing my level in a near finished state. By this i don’t mean all the shaders, effects etc and 100% model completition but completed to a point where the audience can easily see the visualisation to the end point of final completition. I really progressed these last few days, biggest change was redoing the whole lighting again with out lightmass like I stated on my last blog entry. This time playing around with the lighting i believe i have progressed, still have a lot of work to do, however I’m still in mid progression to create excusable scenarios for certain lighting to make point. Certain Areas I wish to add Dynamic lighting, lighting that flickers and sparks etc maybe from a broken light, or a glow from a machine that may be half functional from remaining backup battery sources. In preperation for this i have created some large generators that would enhance the belief. What has worked very well since last blog entry is the large area of roof that has been destroyed exposing the environment to outside lighting to a large scale. With this comes the need to trying to fake bouncing lighting to that of radiosity effect.

Ambient occlusion or shadows have played up here simply because I did a tiledshot 10 to capture this, the rest were done in tiledshot 2 format which has better results, have no idea why.

Alpha Presentation

I believe the presentation went half and half, i showed some nice visual stuff but when I finished the presentation i realised had so much more to show and say. Alot of the things I prepared I didn't show like my Gantt Chart to show just how quick i have progressed from my enitial plan. Forgot to talk about my references in creating the props.  In preperation of the presentation I created a powerpoint presentation which was going to be my main part and then i prepared a one and a half minute matinee sequence in unreal. When it came to the actual presentation it was known that the main computer to host the presentations were not working correctly to show the unreal stuff and so had to host this on my own computer. This made me change my mind on the the technique of presenting, last minute i decided to showcase my unreal project as the whole presentation and try and relate areas back to my pre-prepared powerpoint slide show. It probably wasnt the best idea considering how quickly i had to re-prepare just how im going to show this off but i believe it really helped just trying to explain areas of trouble, and techniques like shaders etc. But like i said earlier i missed alot of important points which if i ran my presentation would have reminded me so abit dissapointed about that. Overall seemed to have got a good reaction to the quality of my scene which im pleased about. I think i learnt to a lesson to stick with what you have prepared.

Extension

                My scene has now extended to match my first map design, extension  of a hall way, several vista’s to create a feel of space and adds more to the environment than just straight narrow paths. Although my intention of the level design is to be strongly narrative it still needs some elements to break this up. What seems to be seen in my references is a half reception area, half green house for study of plant life, but its hard to determine considering there is so much exposed to the outside world that plant life has taken over the whole scene. My weakest point at the moment is creating descent looking foliage, its something i haven’t really had to do much but its something im very eager to create at high standards. Next  few days just going to go over some tutorials, I have no problems making descent alphas but my knowledge of referencing plants i don’t know much about. I’ve took some photos myself but can’t really see what is use-able.

To make my environment scene more believable i want to add some extra details like a vent around the pods on the floor. Some of these have broken glass which would have made the water leak all over the floor. I think creating signs of where the water has drained away is just one of those little extras to make something more indepth. Lighting I think will never be truely finished to how i want it to look, it most certainly isn’t easy to pull off.


Thanks To Nathan for the light mass advice, has paid off quite nicely and a lot easier to light up my scene.

Week 7: Development on Lighting, Alpha Preparation things to do over the weekend

Again it’s been another slow progressive week, this week I decided to start creating a new set of lights without using light mass global illumination. This creates a harder task of creating realistic lighting as it gets rid of all the techniques light mass uses, like emitting bouncing light, this is crucial in my scene because it’s the only way I can have excusable reasons for lighting up my scene apart from the amber coming through the large windows.

These particular shots I created within a few minutes. Creating lighting without light mass is incredibly quick especially the build time; dropping from 1 hour build time in high quality to 45 seconds without light mass shows a big difference. This make life a lot easier for me so I can quickly correct mistakes rather than wasting so much time for it to look rubbish.

Lighting without light mass is defiantly my way to go, I do however miss its effects, I thought they made the scene work very well, but that was with so much strong lighting from lights that you shouldn’t really use too much. Now I’m building with mostly point lights, this is going to really improve overall performance, there’s going to be a huge cut in CPU/GPU performance to process all the lighting, this also gives me an advantage of introducing some fancy dynamic lighting to emphasise some atmosphere. At the moment lighting looks still and boring, creation of some dynamic lighting and shadows to show a bit of movement in the scene I believe will work a treat

Without Lightmass

Over the Weekend

My presentation is going to be simple and straight to the point, over this weekend I will be producing some very high quality video renders out from UDK using the matinee and kismet sequences to demonstrate the level as a walk through.

Before this I need to do the following

• ·         Finish as many props as possible
• ·         Reception desk
• ·         Misc Objects on desks
• ·         Dynamic lighting
• ·         Blockouts for hallway and reception scene

Top of Form Bottom of Form

Week 6: A Long week Of Lighting  Problems & Solutions, Lightmapping Problems, World Properties and PostProcessing Effects  Its a been a very long week, a lot of hours has been put in experimenting with lighting. The main template of the level is already done and i have enough quick models in my packages to scatter around the scene for rubbish & foliage. Lighting this scene has been extremely troublesome, Its never been clear to me how i would go about lighting this scene. My first instincts told me to focus on directional lighting coming across through the large windows placed around the side, using a technique with my alpha planes for glass i could create some interesting shadows along the floor, giving the sense of light direction and a really interesting result. This how ever was not as easy i thought. No matter what i did, my final builds always had extremely dark lighting. The only impressive result was the shadows baked on the floor. And the small bit of lighting coming from the large windows.   When I started building this scene i did at first think about creating the glass without an alpha but instead an emissive applied instead. This would create a glowing effect, the glass in the film shot is not particular transparent, its misty and dirty and the natural sunlight outside is making the window glow. I Have now transitioned to this method and i believe its working allot better. This how ever has now made me re strategise the  type of lights needed to my scene but i will get into this further below. Going back to the dark lighting i found out from some advice that it could be my lightmaps not correctly laid out or just horrendously applied. I found out about the texel shading and lightmap density view. I never understood what they were but now they make a whole lot of sense. Like the checker texture in Maya unreal demonstrates how well the lightmap UV’s worked. For all my work i have been using UDK’s Auto generate UV’s, i got rid of overlapping UV’s because I knew about the effect it would have but it turns out UDK is rubbish at generating second UV’s for lighting. When i found the texel and density view the grid was so poorly applied. Simple flat mesh like the floor was either stretched or squashed. So i had to relightmap every item I have back in Maya. This has now all been complete and reimported  Old Lighting, Alpha Windows With Directional Lights Change of lighting I got some great advice about the lighting for an indoor scene. It turns out the purpose of Lightmass is really for outdoor scenes. This may be a reason why I am struggling to light my scene appropriately. From here I'm going to continue building my scene with and without light mass and constantly compare between the both. Lightmass creates more complex shadowing, where as without lightmass shadows are going to be more harsh, this however will make build times a lot quicker. I recreated the window with an emissive texture as i mentioned earlier. With this UDK now has a feature where the emissive can be used an actual static light. Just by looking in the properties under lightmass and checking use emissive as static light. My world properties i had changed the bloom scale and emissive glow by 25%. This will create a stronger effect. My lighting has changed to more static lighting and a small amount of spotlights for sunlight direction from the window. The result are a lot better, I'm getting a lot more brightness and light blending than i did before. See images and compare yourself. I really want to create a volumetric style of light for the windows above, beams of light would give the player perspective of the main area, the area in the middle with the pods is the main walkway.  Demonstrating Lighting from emmsive, re-textured window World Properties  The use of the world properties is the link to the post processing console which determines how your scene is rendered, From here i have enable Depth Of Field, give a blur in the background. Also Have been playing around with Mid Tones and Saturation and shadow tones The Saturation values are key for my scene, as i said from the beginning this scene is will be greatly influenced by gears of war that uses a low saturation throughout the game to give that gloomy effect. I have followed this and i must admit it allows more light to come through and overall looks better.  New Lighting Next Weeks Task I did decided to quickly introduce the extensions of my scene, A reception area and a walk way. These are currently in Maya preparing to be lightmapped, the next couple of days this mesh will be texture fully and imported into UDK.  Thanks to Elliot and Nathan for advice

Week 5: God Ray Lighting Test, Block-Out to UDK and Asset Creation

Building on from last week I made a quick blockout of my level in UDK. The only use I had from my original blockout in Maya was the outershell. The outershell contains all the information I need, height, length and width, objects like the pillars have been built to the height of the shell, and if they need extending, well UDK has the power to scale objects without distorting anything. The most important area of this scene is the lighting. In the film you can see the large windows are the main elements of producing natural daylight. I tried to create this effect using God Rays, and changing colour of rays to a daylight blue colour. I believe this work's well for my scene but the lighting is not complete. Theres still alot of work to do inside both lighting, and asset creating.
It is all starting to come together now though and looking very interesting

Advanced Material Creation
When it came to the flooring of my scene I came across a big problem. Creating a seamless texture that cannot really be scene by the player as a repeatitive texture. I came across a fantastic technique that UDK has and that creating a texture from several different types of textures and tiling the blended textures random to give the overlay effect a random look creating what seems to be a seamless texture that constantly changes.

I will quickly walk you through how this texture is working. Imported is two different textures, the main one is the tiles which I put smears of mould on top. Second texture is a seamless texture of mould and stone. Third Texture (Reddish Coloured One) is a combination of 3 unique textures. Created in photo-shop, each colour channel has its own unique texture. This is so when using this RGB texture you can choose the effect of your overlay by selecting the colour channel of your RGB texture to the alpha of the Lerp node. 
Connecting the other two normal texture samples to A, B you will see the combination. Playing with the colour channel of the RGB texture will give different results.
To get my desired look I added a constant and multiply to increase the detail from my RGB texture.


To Improve this texture I will combine two specular maps from both the tiled texture and the texture in the RGB, followed by both normal maps from the same textures, combing these to lerps will give a much more in depth outcome.


Asset Creation
A new addition to my asset collection is the very distinctive Robotic Egg Handling Arm. These are another piece of main props for the scene. Several of these can be seen streaming all the way down the middle of the laboratory. I do need to make a few adjustments, like positioning of the arm different looking props. Would be a bad idea to have 4, 5 of these in a line all looking completely the same.

Week 3, Slow-week

Its been a very delayed week for me from being very ill stopping me from doing my environment, what I had such much passion for creating this week has been hard to even look at and has been delayed. This week I can only show what I started near enough at the end of my last blog.

The top image is of a block out in Maya of this scene. If I can get this spot on, all I have to do is import this simple block-out back into unreal and I have the best idea of a template. All my other assets can be built around this. I have also been looking into Lightmaps. I have been hearing a lot of conversation on the way unreal lights up objects and bakes shadows. Its seems as though if you want the best looking results you have to create a second UV Set. I found out the long way that there must not be overlapping UV's in your second set. This slowed me down a little bit because most of my objects do overlap, so had to redo the second lot.

I used this website to get an understanding of Lightmaps:

Quick Tip: An Introduction to Light-Mapping in UDK: http://cg.tutsplus.com/tutorials/game-dev/quick-tip-an-introduction-to-light-mapping-in-udk/

Plan of action next week
If I make a full recovery by next week I'm going to make sure week 4 is my busiest. I have a lot of catching up to do now, week 4 will i will have to create the whole outer shell of the laboratory in Maya and introduce some God Rays and start playing around with some lighting.

Week 2, Asset Modelling, Alpha Problem Solving And Advanced Material Creating

First Asset, First Problem

It has been a very busy week or so creating Assets for my scene of choice and trying to over come problems that I have confronted from previous experience inside Unreal Material Editor.

For the Presentation last week I displayed a brief render of my first asset created. Its purpose was to show the direction of art style I have chosen and and the power that unreal can pull it off. I created a very improvised look of a dinosaur cloning pod that can be seen throughout my chosen scene. Its an important prop because there are several of these in a massive row though out the level design. Problem with creating this asset was references, there wasn't actually any reference of the Pod in full, just its bottom half. I wasn't completely pleased with the end result it seemed it was just to compact and didn't really look interesting.

The importance of its creation was to highlight the problems I will be facing. From previous experience in Unreal I have had trouble with Alpha's and there effects towards lighting. In this case if you can't tell from the image the alpha is actually glowing. If I created a very dark scene the green from the alpha will not be affected it will really stand out. The machine does not work so there should not be any light emitting from this. So the water and alpha glowing cannot be ignored.

The scene will be full of alpha's due to all the foliage, glass, and large windows so this problem must be sorted for me to proceed.

Asset Correction

After much research i found some enlighting references. After searching for the creative director I found that Rick Bulm has opened an istitute full of the original props and sets he designed and made. Because of this I found the correct design of the dinosaur cloning pods. Some changes had to be made mostly to the extension of the top. They do as well look alot more interesting instead of my improvisation that seemed to just cap the top off. I completly re-textured this model because i wasn’t to pleased about the colours i had chosen. I can see from the film that these pods are metallic silver with mould running down unlike my last set which seemed to look more like a concreate and tar effect. The other pods will however still be used in my Vista Scenes i shall create. It could be that each style of Pod holds different species of dinosaur. To save Polys the broken glass have been created within the Alpha’s.

Alpha's have now been improved but not completely fixed. Now they do react to the light, but are invisible when there is low light. That means the mould on the windows will disappear in low light and loose its effect. The broken glass made with alphas will also be invisible. The water material is still no reactive to light, to try and stop the glow of the alpha I created a murky dark texture to try and diffuse the glow. It has worked surprisingly well. I cannot change the water material blend or opacity state, it has to be created with an unlit material. The poly count has gone up to nearly 1500 more triangles due to this modification, that is including the water mesh. It hasn't been full checked for optimisation so I maybe able to lower the count.

Dino Egg Incubators

These Incubators were the second Assets I created. This and the pods will fill the entire scene. You can see in the film shot that there are rows and rows of these throughout the lab. So it was an important descision to create these. Now the main props that will fill the scene are created I can move onto the blockout of the level. The fact that they are already textured and Unreal ready the blockout will give a clear vision of what the final production could look like. Inside these incubators there will be some hatched dinosaur eggs. Most of these incubators will be very green and broken, this one however is working. I think i could have a few open and working just to give the player some interaction in the scene.

Tileable Stairs & Platforms

This Stairs and Platfroms are the last of my asset creation until i have created a blockout of the level. Another important asset because they are seen throughout the scene shots in the film. This also will allow me to plan the second floor of the level. 

Please click image to see Unreal Material Reference....

The Material I have created for the stairs have been made to give the illusion that there is something behind the metal grid flooring like pipes with out me having to model them. It has worked very successfully and does work surprisingly well.

Material Creation

The Metal grid needs an alpha texture to show the second texture underneath the grid. The red colour of the alpha connects to all 3 Lerps.

Lerps are used to combine more than one texture together, this can also be used to make a whole new texture combining two textures together.

The Underylay texture connects to both Diffuse and Specular Lerp so the colour of the texture is seen but also its effect from the light hitting it.

This texture needs a bumpoffset connected to it to create the depth, to do this I used a constant connected to the height. The TexCoord is used to tell the material editor that the underlay texture can only be tiled once because it isnt a full 1024 tileable texture. Other case tileable textures can be tiled as much as you want.

Both normals off both textures are connected through the lerp and are powered by a constant4Vector, The power of the colour channels in this control how much depth of the normal can be seen, abit of playing about can create all sorts of results.

Asset Creation Scene & Alpha Lighting Tests

Jurassic Park 3 Asset Creation. A small Scene hosting the most important assets that make up my influential scene of choice, Ingens, Abadoned Laboratory. This screen shot contains several Egg Incubators, Complete set of tileable stairs and platforms, Dinosaur cloning pods (background). Several Styles broken, filled with preservative liquid and containing a life form itself.

The Alpha’s have now become more reactive to the lighting surrounding them. Its still a troubled process however. Now the alpha’s only show when there is lighting to effect it. In a dark scene this may become a problem. On top of this the water material is still none reactive because it has been built under an Unlit Material. At the moment the effect works well, but again this may also pose a problem. Glowing alpha’s have completly gone.

Asset Scale Checking

Its ok building from Maya using Unreals Template Character Model but there are however a couple of checks that need to be taken care off. First off when you import an asset to unreal which you believe is to scale the actual Gameplay in Unreal creates a camera near to the chest of the character. As it is an FPS, this can be deceiving and your scale may be to large or to small. However in this situation my scale seems to be spot on. Have been scaling models just below the neck of the template character and so far have not needed to make any changes. Both first person and third person seem pretty much perfect to scale.

Plan of action next week

• Start and finish primary block out.
• Research into Alpha's
• Create Small Poly Props

Research-Movie Scene Selection

My Chosen Scene Selection is from Jurassic Park 3 (Ingen Abandoned Genetics Laboratory)

A Selection of work from Rick Bulm, Creative Art Director for the Jurassic Parks. These are the best images of reference to proceed in creating true to the film replication in my Laboratory Environment. Obviously difference would be the texture, mould and rust etc.

Scene 1: References from the Film, The largest image above will be my actual beauty shot that i  will take at the end to compare. The lighting is going to be a Big Challenge. The outside lighting is my only source of light indoors. On top of this I will have to create a spacial environment outside to because of its exposure through open roofs, broken windows and doors.

Scene 2: References again from the film but actually in the genetic area of the laboratory, home to the creation of the dinosaurs. This will be the main enticing area that player will be able to navigate, interact with props etc. Again another challenging demand for lighting, if unsuccessful the frame rate in game could drop drastically, lighting will need to be sufficient that it can pick up the details of all the props. 

3 key games that will deeply influence the final outcome of this project. Gears of war will play a big role into the artistic direction of the lab scene. Gears of war is full of Grungy war torn destroyed, aged environments and this will apply heavily to my own textures.
Turok is a good example of the game play I want to achieve. It has nothing to with the fact it has a similar objective of surviving from dinosaur attacks. But they have a created a first person shooter with a great function of manoeuvrability to dodge, move quickly and excute the your enemy. FPS perspective is certainly the best decision for the player, fans like my self will be keen to explore environments just like this, look at all the eye candy props, and maybe even interact with them, Jurassic Park has a great sense of exploration, its taking you to a world that existed over 65 million years ago. I want to try and create a very tiny part of this world and give credit to where credit is due.