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.