UFC venue - Maya to Unreal

Lamont

This project is going to be a little more ambitious than the tower. This time going for some Kismet, a full arena (to the tunnels and up to the roof and jumbo/strip-o-tron), cooking for PS3 (which would mean branching the pipeline) and figuring out how much UnrealEd can deal with. I want to do many things that we weren't allowed to do in an NBA arena (tech-wise and art-wise). Never seen a UFC match and really don't have an interest in it, I just like the challenge.

My previous job had me making NBA arenas. I've done those for 4 years solid, so re-use of geometry is like 2nd nature. Also, I have arena specs from a half dozen still stuck in my head along with sizes and dimensions of tons of objects.

My friend is taking on the character and crowd models, I handle the shaders, Kismet, lighting and venue. To place objects off the grid in Unreal and have then accurate I am using a Mel I made called Unreal Mambo, it takes the locations of meshes in Maya and exports the data for Unreal to read. Much faster placement with vert/poly/edge snapping. Probably have to write a custom script for character placement.

This is the source image I am starting from. I am sure Unreal has nothing in place to deal with a crowd of this magnitude, but I do have some ideas on how to go about this:



So, gonna grab a glass of Kool Aide and get to it... starting with the ring first, then create the shaders for the character (clothes, eyes, hair, skin) and back to the arena.

Lamont

Drew out my fake NBA arena and planning for making it modular. Did the ring, need to do normals and spec maps. The rectangle is NBA court size paint to paint (end to end up to the painted border), the one in the ring is burly-man height (like 6'7"~6'8"). Racks, ring accessories and jumbo tomorrow.

Daaark

I'll be watching this thread for sure. I'm obsessed with arena modeling. Are you doing everything to scale? I think the Wikipedia article on the octagon has the official specs.

Lamont

Daaark wrote: »

I'll be watching this thread for sure. I'm obsessed with arena modeling. Are you doing everything to scale? I think the Wikipedia article on the octagon has the official specs.

Yeah, everything is to real-world scale and I got the size of the octagon from Wiki. Will start the racks for the lights in a few moments.

Reverenddevil

Being a huge MMA fan the one issue I see if youre trying to make it authentic, is that Red Bull has never sponsored the UFC. They have never had a giant ad in the center of the ring like that. The most recent UFC 92 had BUD LIGHT in the center of the ring and Harley Davidson has been a big sponsor lately. Just to keep it authentic I would go with one of those..

Lamont

I noticed RedBull has never sponsored a UFC event, I went with them anyways because I dig the drink. I also have Subaru and Yokohama (Yokohama is btw, I just buy their products) and a few other logo's that are not real UFC sponsors.

Lamont

Cool, spent some time making the LED screen shader. Red from the image illuminates the red "leds", blue does "blue" and green does "green". This shader has a few settings like a real TV: brightness, contrast and working on refresh rate. You can also define your "monitor resolution" and if you want square or rectangular pixels.

Daaark

Why is your octagon base so low? It looks to be about 6 inches, and in the pictures it's up to the guy's shoulders. I think the ones low to the ground are only used on TUF, not in the big arenas.

Lamont

Daaark wrote: »

Why is your octagon base so low? It looks to be about 6 inches, and in the pictures it's up to the guy's shoulders. I think the ones low to the ground are only used on TUF, not in the big arenas.

I am going to use the steps as ref and assume that they are 6"~7" per step, there are 5 steps, so that's 30~35 inches. The model isn't at 35 inches yet. Also the base isn't up to the guys shoulders. I am looking at a guy and he's got his elbow on it. And another guy is sitting in a chair and it's easily at the middle of his chest.

Daaark

I just looked it up. It's 48 inches / 1.2meters. 35 inches is a wrestling/boxing ring, which is waist high.

Lamont

Thanks for the info. Then that makes the steps 9.6 inches tall, huge but tall.

00Zero

haha, you just reinvented the tv....digitally.

Jeremy Lindstrom

off hand, might be just the angle of the dangle, but looks like the scale from the image and the scale you've got are different. The outside of the octagon looks smaller then what you have built out, yours looks larger on the outside then the ref image. Could be just the angle though.

Lamont

Yeah, I am trying to find a good top view to even things out. I'm looking at things and going by what that items size might be, the more numbers I find the better.

Lamont

Reverenddevil wrote: »

Being a huge MMA fan the one issue I see if youre trying to make it authentic, is that Red Bull has never sponsored the UFC. They have never had a giant ad in the center of the ring like that. The most recent UFC 92 had BUD LIGHT in the center of the ring and Harley Davidson has been a big sponsor lately. Just to keep it authentic I would go with one of those..

Hey, do they come out of tunnels like a boxer would or like some WWF dude? All the shots I find are of the fight.

t4paN

The fighters walk in through a tunel, boxing style. Take a look at my photobucket, I've got some pics you might find useful.


http://s158.photobucket.com/albums/t110/t4paN/UFC80/

/edit BTW, Spike TV only sponsors small-ish events, the big PPV events don't have any Spike logos on. Just sayin'.

Lamont

t4paN wrote: »

The fighters walk in through a tunel, boxing style. Take a look at my photobucket, I've got some pics you might find useful.


http://s158.photobucket.com/albums/t110/t4paN/UFC80/

/edit BTW, Spike TV only sponsors small-ish events, the big PPV events don't have any Spike logos on. Just sayin'.

Nice!! You took pics of stuff people don't usually take pics of. Thanks a lot !!

t4paN

I used to have a shitload of pics from that event in my digicam but I only kept these ones.

Lamont

Were these screens here projected or were they mounted LCD's?

t4paN

I think they were projected, but I could be wrong. It would be a waste to not use your LED screen shader though, so...

Daaark

Lamont wrote: »

Were these screens here projected or were they mounted LCD's?

When I attend RAW and Smackdown tapings, they used projectors for the big screen. It's attached to the center scaffolding / light rig.

Highly doubt UFC would do any different. They tour and use general purpose buildings. It's much easier just to hang up a screen for the night.