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.