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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.

Is released.
Get it at http://www.fileplanet.com/192875/190000/fileinfo/Unreal-Tournament-3—The-Haunted-Mod-v2.5

Will be typing up a ”Making of…”-continue…ation…thing (as in, a word for every 10th picture) over the next few days so keep an eye out.

http://www.moddb.com/mods/the-haunted

Get it, and I’ll see you out there!

quickie render of the assets i finished today.
Very deformable and bendable rock assets.

I worked as an environment artist on this project during my time at Grin. It was just announced: Lead & Gold. Check the trailer below!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RQ5fT96Q2JA

There has been a lack of updates in this blog recently for a number of reasons:
1) I’ve been slightly too busy doing stuff unrelated to game development and so the time I’ve had to work on stuff I actually work on stuff rather than writing about working on stuff.

2) For reasons I can’t go into I’ve held back this post for a sort of an upcoming event, but I got the go-ahead to post it anyway.

So LIGHTING. Good lighting is what makes or breaks an environment, you know it, I know it – Everyone knows it. It’s awesome to work on The Haunted and be the primary lighting dude, specally since we did really well in the MSUC contest. Winning that is like one clap on the shoulder and two kicks in the ass. Of course it’s a good thing to win four catagories but now the preassure is on and the next time around we have to be even better!
A big step on the way towards the ”better” is a compleatly new level. It’s called TH-Temple. Level design by Schlauchi, art by Hegi and cds and myself.
So lets get into it, shall we?

TH-Temple
Alright, so below this text you see the level with the temporary lighting someone set up (I honestly don’t know who, and it doesn’t really matter, but for the sake of this text let’s just say it was this kid.)
So this kid set up the temporary lighting and as you can see it’s not that exciting. Everything melts together and becomes a blur, which is great if you’re out having a beer and you’re after a buzz. But there is no beer here. We want no buzz. We want a dark scary temple where you can kill zombies and look cool doing it!

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So I went in and compleatly replace the current lighting set up with my own. I’ll go into further details about how that set up is later in this post, per popular request. This picture below is actually a picture of the latest version of the map (worthnoty is that it’s not the FINAL though. I still have a few light passes left to do on it.)

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In this picture you see an older version of the sky dome in the map. Hegi later tossed in a bit of a redish tint in it to make it more interesting.

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For once, Schlauchi went ”TOO BRIGHT!”which was super confusing. I ran outside, screaming. And you know, it was raining and very dramatic and I was convinced Schlauchi had been obducted by some…thing. Turns out he just had a compleatly different take on what this level should be in TH compared to the other ones.
If the whole level is dark it adds variation to the whole game. So we went in a compleatly different direction for Temple: We made it dark. In this specific picture it’s bright though….

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Next are a bunch of progress shots of the interior lighting in the main dome shaped tower.

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So this is my basic light set up. I have this semi-standardised version but I have to make changes on each map to make it all good.
First off I got a skylight (Ambient lighting) set to a fairly low value just to avoid all dark spots.
I got the primary light source at the top of the picture. It’s a directional light that casts shadow (Sun, or in the case of temple: Moon)
Then I got two ”help lights” (bottom right) that are cast vauge lighting in slightly different angles than the sun/moon light actor, but from the ”bottom”. These doesn’t cast shadows and I use them to simulate Bounce from the moon light actor.
At the bottom right I got two ”shadow lights” that I use to control the shadows. I got one pointing in from the exact opposit angle (X/Y axis)to the moon light actor and one directly under it but in negative Z-axis compared to the sun (as in, it’s pointing ”up”)
Neither of them cast shadows and I use them purly to light up my shadows so they don’t go all dark.

Like I said: Each lighting set up I do differs from level to level but they’re always simillar so this is the basic set up I use.

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In addition to having this general system for the entire map (displayed in the picture above) I go in and place spot lights in the level to make things pop more.  These spot lights are low radious, high brightness on selected assets and locations to make important locations such as ladders more visible or to add to the overall depth in the scene.

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Each torch has three, sometimes four light actors.
Light 1) Really high brightness, small radious yellow light.
Light 2)  High brightness with slightly bigger light radious. This light is still yellow but slightly more orange inhue. It is the ”primary” light source for the torch that actually effects how much light the torch casts that actually matters and isnt just for good looks.
Light 3) Low brightness, large radious red light.
Alternative 4th light: Secondary bounce, low brightness, large radious light that isn’t placed close to the source but acts as a secondary bounce of the light. Useful in damp, wet environments where light would be reflected alot.

That’s all for now,Cya!

Win win win

We won:
Best Non Fps mod
Best Level for mod (First place: Forsaken Canyon. Fifth place: Stronghold)
Best Weapon set
Best Graphics in map (First place: Forsaken Canyon)

Source: http://www.makesomethingunreal.com/phase3_winners.aspx

I know this place has been quite for some time but I’m working on The Haunted stuff that I can’t show just yet… 🙂 More to come though!
For more about The Haunted: http://www.moddb.com/mods/the-haunted

So here’s pictures from progress of the last few days. I’m busy with irl stuff as well (moving, partying, sleeping) so it’s going a bit slow at the moment…

Rendered in Unreal engine 3 with a fairly simple light set up. I discovered a few tricks regarding lighting to make it pop though. It’s super leet and haxy and A SUPER SECRET… But buy me a beer and i’ll probably tell you.

Same texture, rendered in Maya.

Started building the tunnel entrance asset…

30-40 minutes later…

10 minutes later

And the finished high poly. Going to take skew a few bricks next, rotate ’em and just make it a little more twisted. Then I’ll be taking the lowpoly mockup version and take it into into Mudbox and make it into Grut-mesh.

The picture in the previous update has a bug, it uses the wrong Normalmap so it looks a bit weird so just nevermind it for now.
Here is a in engine (UE3) test of the brick texture on a few BSP surfaces.

Unlit

Lit using a skylight, three directional lights and a spotlight.

Continued working on the brickwall, added mortar/grut/stickyshit between the bricks.
The mesh/wall isn’t in anyway an actual asset but just a mean to display the texture. Ignore the cornersm, i know they look bad for the simple reason that I havnt made corner assets yet.