Platforms for Design

New day, new works.  Blocked out some details to help the design team to visualize their platform layout a lot easier.  Some horizontally modular panels, stair steps, supports, and a lift.  More to come in the future!

Going to put in a bit more work into some of the other pieces, but once those are done, it'll be off into learning how to animate a sky dome for the underwater level and more playing with terrain and height maps!

Bubbles and More Fog!

So today was a productive day.  Made several changes, improvements and additions to the level.  Still bugged about the environmental coloring though.  Something I really want to fix.

• Fixed the main glass dome's UVs for proper reflection with the cube maps I made.
• Created cube maps for the interior of the dome and another for the exterior environment.
• Fixed up the glass material a bit, still not what I want it to be, but it's better than what I had initially.  Still needs more work so the dome glass feels like glass.
• Created a quick bubble texture in Photoshop and used it to then create a new particle emitter in Cascade for bubbles underwater.  Did this one rather quickly, so it has room for me to go back and improve on.
• Also added in a FogVolumeLinearHalfspaceDensityInfo node to the level.  Tweaked it a bit to match the level.
• Fixed some artifacting with my dust particles where, due to the high DoF focus inner radius setting, my low opacity dust particles were inverting the blur effect from DoF so you would see unblurred spots where the dust particles were lol.  So that's fixed.

Underwater Level Updates

More updates after two days.  They are as follows:

• Studied up on an intro to cascade to learn about the basics of creating particle effects
• Used said knowledge to create simple dust particles in the environment to help occlude light from my dominant directional light and create more god rays.
• Tweaked my dominant directional light for god rays and set it's direction to more of an angle to push the rays from the play perspective.
• Tweaked exponential height fog settings to get a better feel.
• Added in some fake god rays which are really noticeable.  Will be returning to either fix them, or may remove them altogether.
• Busy trying to figure out how to create a fog volume that'll help push the god rays even more.  That, or perhaps dust clouds. Still learning those

With Fake God Rays

With Natural God Rays

This was my first time touching particle effects in UDK and Cascade as well.  Thank god for tutorials throughout the internet!  That, and made progress with natural god rays (not the fake ones) thanks a ton to Callum from Polycount forums.  But still have a ways to go to make this feel more like an underwater environment.  

Creating bubbles won't be too hard, will probably take the same approach as I took with the dust particles.  It's just creating that fog/cloud underwater which breaks up the light even more that has been heavy into research.   But I will get there!!

Underwater Status Update

Things are moving along!  Everything is roughly blocked out right now.  The terrain is just to ground the environment and will be replaced once I get to it.  It's just a static mesh from Maya.  I'll be using UDK's terrain editor in the future to replace it.

The foliage is roughly scattered.  Textures are all pretty flat, again, just to establish a feel for the environment.

The newest stuff include an added lightmass importance volume, mapped a caustic material to a dominant directional light and also enabled light shafts in the light.

Now, I'm struggling with figuring out how to create a water and post processing volume for the entirety of the environment, BUT, excluding the interior of the foreground dome.  That, and also how to create faked god rays/light shafts which flicker by interacting with the water's panning normals.

All new stuff for me.  So going nuts on it with a deadline of Thursday.  Weeee!

Machu Picchu Update

With the end of the last semester for the USC students came the near-end closure for Machu Picchu.  While we may revisit this level to refine a few things in the future, right now, all my attention and focus is on the Underwater Facility level.  I want to get this level as polished as I can make it before late March when I drive up north to the S.F. Bay Area and attend the Game Developer Conference.

But one thing is for certain, I need to throw on some screenshots of Machu Picchu as it looked when the USC team demo'ed the game during Demo Day.  In the near future, before attending GDC, I will be working on creating a short fly through of the level as a video and probably import the level into Maya to show the wireframes.

But anyway, below is Machu Picchu.

Underwater Facility

With the start of the new term at USC comes the start of the new level in which I am assigned to work on.  I am crazy excited to take on and test myself on the underwater level for Scrapyard.  This underwater level will actually be within a dome structure.  There, the players will battle it out with a fairly unobstructed view of the great ocean background we will have.

Below is a screenshot of my UDK viewport showing the blockout in the engine.  This blockout is just that, a blockout, expect changes on small and large scales.  At the very least, it gives our designers a good idea of what we were aiming for so they can work on the actual design elements for this level.

More updates will come as I progress along!