Monthly Archives: september 2009

So I picked up this project again after having it on stand by for a while.

Temple was lacking alot in terms of vegetation. There was a few trees but it wasnt supported with enough smaller plants, grass and other vegetation.
Because of this I decided to make a few assets to that end.

(Below) The mesh for the grass. I need to work on it some more for later because it isnt good enough when viewed from above.

(Below) a few of the climbing vegetation assets (Klätterväxter… vafan heter det på eng?)

(Below) All the vegetation assets I made for temple. I built everything as I placed the basic ones in the editor and realized I needed different shapes and sizes.

(Below) Placing grass, tweaking material

(Below) started placing vegetation on the level. Here’s a bunch of progression pictures from different parts of the level.

(Below) On this pic you can see the moon I made, that required a bit of tweaking before it looked right. A friend of mine asked about how much is BSP and how much is meshes so I took two pictures. One with everything, and one with just BSP.

(Below) I noticed that this bridge didn’t look all that good

(Below) So I started adressing that. These are the floor units from the last post.

(Below) The moon was just the result of a night I couldn’t sleep. I got up, looked around the levels with a tired pair of eyes and I felt something was missing in the sky. It required quite a bit of tweaking and supporting assets to give it a ”shine” and to make it blend well with the rest of the sky. Next up are a bunch of pictures displaying it’s evolution.

(Below) vegetation and stone plates floor in action, using a mix of BSP with the tileing texture and mesh assets.

Alright, so there was like… I don’t know, two or three weeks till Make something Unreal contest deadline, phase 4. I had just come out from working hard on the lighting in Temple and I managed to finish it in time for The Haunted 2.5 release, so thats awesome. You know whats not awesome? Not having anything to do.
So having finished my final lighting pass on Temple I checked the map with a new set of eyes: My Environment artist eyes and I noticed alot of things that was missing.
So what do I, as a work aholic slightly bored environment artist do?
I go in to a three week crunch period to get Temple looking even more awesome. Hear that? MOAR AWSUM!

Floor tiles
I recognized the need for more floor assets. I decided to make a new texture and supplement brick assets as meshes. I decided to sculpt three rocks in Mudbox of the following sizes:
64x64x64
128x128x64
128x64x64
I built them on Unreal’s native grid so I could use the indivdual stone plate assets inside the editor without much hazzle.

Here’s a bunch of pictures from development.
(Below) One of the high poly assets sculpted in mudbox.

(Below) Wireframe of the highpoly

(Below) The final lowpoly asset that I used in the level, only with normalmap.

(Below) Wireframe of the lowpoly asset. I didn’t model out any of the details because I wanted to keep it really low poly and be able to use them alot rather than have few, really detailed ones.

(Below) These are the three stone plates that I have tesselated so they can be deformed.

(Below) I built a small walk way, just to try out how I would make the floor texture later on.

(Below) I got a little sidetracked testing how deformable the assets were.

(Below) I modeled the floor tiles to be baked out as the texture asset. The floor is 1024×1024 and each of the stone plate are individually placed and rotated. Was quite a bit of puzzling.

(Below) I threw on a few deoformers on the floor model, just to play a bit. Some say this is ”Wasting time playing.” but I prefer to see it as R&D!

(Below) Alright, so I played around a bit more. VERY deformable stone plates RULE!

I baked the 1024×1024 asset to a 2048×2048 texture (2-1 pixel ratio) and then went in and hand painted each stone. Later on there were some further tweaking of the diffuse map inside Unreal Engine 3 material editor but this is how I got the bulk of the asset done.