BFA Final - Secret Government Base (UDK)
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More updates! The deadline for my graded portion of this assignment has passed so now I have extra time to devote to finishing this environment to my satisfaction without being rushed.
After getting some awesome advice from a mentor, I've jumped back on to this project full force. Here are some updated shots of the rooms I've been working on recently -
These rooms aren't yet complete, these are just the most recently updated sections. I plan on filling out the space with more furniture/objects so it doesn't seem so empty.
Any feedback is greatly appreciated!
Hey Guys, this is my progress so far on my final senior BFA project for school. The idea is to create an environment from a-z in UDK in one semester. This will also be my first complete game environment.
Any and all feedback is more than welcome, I'm here to improve after all!
The whole idea behind this environment in a nutshell is that it's one of several hidden bases of the secret "one major world government" called the "World Containment Initiative." The player is exploring as a modern day character discovering an old, closed down base from 1960-ish cold war era.
Still getting the major pieces in at the moment before I add any story related details.
Sewer line entrance
First entering the base
main room(possible conference area?)
So far this is the first problem that I've hit that I can't solve.
Setting up a translucent material for this door, I have only the windows alpha masked, but for some reason the handle gets all messed up, almost like the normals are reversed (they aren't)
any thoughts? Like I said, this is my first UDK project, so it may me a simple solution that I'm just not seeing.
Replies
Also, I have the mask on an alpha channel on the Diffuse texture, should I have it as a separate texture? And finally, when I change the material to blend_masked, it makes the window 100% transparent, which is why I was using blend_translucent, so I can have some detail overlaying the window. When I have the material in any other mode than translucent, the handle is fine.
I think it's a bit odd that you are having problems with the handle and not the entire door- which it is opaque? I think it could be a mapping issue? or mesh normal issue of the door handle alone? try separating your entire door model in Maya and see what happens? Well I think that's the best I can do though-
In 3ds Max you'll need to set 2 material IDs for the object if you're exporting as FBX. Assign the diffuse/spec/normal material to the opaque faces of the model and assign the ALPHA material to the transparent faces.
Hope that helps.
EDIT: I see you're using Maya. I believe instead of using material IDs you could just assign the individual materials to the respective faces of the model. In UDK when you open static mesh properties you need to have two "elements", one for the diffuse texture and one for the alpha.
I ended up trying Sushi's advice and going back into maya and assigning two separate materials to the mesh and then applying two different materials in UDK under the separate elements.
Rhoutermans, I agree with you about the major concrete usage. I was looking into breaking it up with vertex painting and introducing new materials, but I cant seem to find anything about vertex painting on BSP brush geometry, which is what a lot of my major walls/floors are made of. Should I go back and replace my structural elements with actual meshes? Or am I missing something and there actually is a way to use vertex painting with BSP?
^ Added a vertex paint material to the main back wall as a test and I quite like the result.
As for issues I'm having, for one I can't figure out how to remove that yellow gradient on the right side of the screen when I'm test playing my map. I've figured out that's it's caused by the bloom scale, But I would like to figure out how to remove it without disabling bloom all together.
And secondly, I have three texture samples going in to my vertex paint material, and its seemingly random if the third channel decides to appear in game or not. Just a weird quirk?
I'd try and work your spec a bit the scene feels kinda flat. Same with the lighting. I can do a paintover of sorts for the lighting if you want.
Like I said this is my first experience in UDK so I may just be missing something simple
I've been playing a lot with lighting trying to get a more dramatic look to everything. After looking back everything definitely felt very stale. I want to scene to feel cold and dead, but when the lights are flipped on for the first time in a long time, it's almost like the place is coming back to life.
Also starting to populate the scene a bit more with little things(decals, lights etc). I also worked on the specular on a lot of the main materials, as well as introduced some new materials all together so its not so monotonous.
Hi! Looking good!
About the spec/gloss. If you are using gloss maps, you might want to multiply them with a constant of 50-100 before you connect it to SpecularPower, somehow I feel i get a more "correct" result when I do this.
Hope this helps!
That does seem to help! Whenever I would hook up a gloss map it didn't seem to look right in the previewer, and now it does! Awesome. Should I be multiplying the specular map as well? It seems to make a pretty drastic difference in the preview if I even bump it up a little bit.
http://500px.com/ernestsebastien
Happy to help!
You don´t really need to multiply the spec, but if you want to increase it slightly you can multiply it with a much smaller number like maybe 1.5 or so.
you could also add a Power before the multiply to get more contrast.
I prefer to make the changes in photshop, unless i´m creating a spec from a diffuse inside UDK.
I don´t really know why the glossmap needs to be multiplied with such a large number. something i should find out
The gloss of the phong lighting model is simply the exponent of the specular reflection. By default your textures range from 0 to 1, so the maximum exponent you'd get would be 1 (where the texture is pure white). When you multiply it with a large number, you'll end up with exponents such as 20 or 40, which will darken the already dark parts of the specular while keeping the bright ones first.
Don't multiply the specular texture at all - you'd probably end up with values over 1, which would mean the surface would reflect more light than it receives, but then again, you're using phong which doesn't take energy conservation into account at all. Values over 1, for example 1.5, coupled with an exponent of lets say, 20, would end up with a value of over 3000, meaning it would reflect 3000 times the light it receives.
When you keep your maximum spec at 1, it doesn't matter how high your spec power is, as 1^a bazillion is still 1.
If you don't really know which textures and values do what, I'd suggest you to take a look at PBR - much easier to understand as the values are based on real world data and not just tweaked per material, as well as consistent look under varying lighting conditions.
@Santewi - Thanks for the clarification, that definitely clears some of my technical questions up. I've seen a couple links about PBR floating around so I guess now is the time to check that out!
At the moment my biggest annoyance is finding out the proper way to create reflection distortion for the puddles. I've found a couple of tutorials but they all seem to be a bit dated, and links are broken etc.
I think everything still looks sort of sparse and underpopulated so that's what I would be working on over this last month.
Finally I was wondering if any of you had any insight into creating some post processing like this? Its basically just VERY slight anaglyph, but I like how it looks (this was photoshopped)
If you're using cubemaps, anything that you plug in the normal slot will automatically distort the reflection.
If you're using RenderToTexture, you need to distort the UVs of the RTT. Two scrolling cloud textures at different speeds should work just fine.
What you have in the last picture is called chromatic aberration. Please don't use it, it is way too overused and makes the image look blurry.
If you absolutely have to use it, you can just offset the blue channel a bit to the right (add something like [0.01,0] to the UVs of the blue) and combine it with non-offset R and G.
After getting some awesome advice from a mentor, I've jumped back on to this project full force. Here are some updated shots of the rooms I've been working on recently -
These rooms aren't yet complete, these are just the most recently updated sections. I plan on filling out the space with more furniture/objects so it doesn't seem so empty.
Any feedback is greatly appreciated!