bunker environment (June challenge #20 continuation)

ScottHoneycutt

http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?t=135400

I'm still working on last month's challenge (20) linked above. At this point I have a few questions about scene management:

First of all this was my first time dealing with so many things in so many files. If anyone has scene and file management advice I would love to hear it. I had the high poly done and slowing my scene down to 10 minute-ish save and load times. I had to chop it into separate files. Each file had part of the scene and each scene part ended up with its own save increments. Some unsmoothed ... some not UVed ... some exploded ... some reformed from explosion, etc. I recently placed all the low poly assets into the same file to bake simple AOs (3ds Max) only to realize that I apparently did NOT have smoothing groups checked on FBX export. I went back to re-export to find that I have very little understanding of the several files I have "all over the place" and I believe I did NOT save the reformed versions of many assets after the explosion bake. In one instance I went to my most recent file of an asset (gas mask) and found that it did not even have the updated UVs on it. Long story short I am re-placing smoothing groups on most/all of the assets. Ironically I had placed the assets in Unity to test the normal bakes and they looked good (bake and mesh ... at least I don't remember noticing any smoothing issues). Now I am placing the newly smoothed meshes into UDK.

Question: How do I place into UDK without hassle? I saw some post around Polycount saying something about making the pivot point o,o,o so they will go into the scene at the same place ... tried it and they are still placing wherever I drag/place the cursor.

Question: I make a normal bake, high poly AO bake and simple low poly AO bake. I baked smooth, high poly beveled edges around the walls and ceiling. I scrapped it feeling it unnecessary. Agree? Also i was working hard to bake simple AO on them for the corners, did some more UDK research and it seems as if I should use UDK lighting for the corner shadows around walls. Agree? The skylight doesn't seem to work in an indoor environment. I tried mental ray materials and found the render time to be awful for the final gather alone and gave up.

I would like to make the scene look good in UDK and I haven't done anything major with shader networks in it. Any specific links on the matter would also be appreciated. It seems sort of a scattered subject matter to research.

Thanks

Pookhan

Hey, the reason for exporting your mesh at 0,0,0 co-ordinates is because UDK will place the pivot point in the centre of the map, regardless of where your mesh is. So if your mesh is 1000 units to the left of the 0,0,0 in Max, it will import into UDK with the pivot point 1000 units away from your mesh.

If you export your mesh in Max at 0,0,0 co-ordinates then your pivot point in UDK will be in the centre of your mesh, assuming you centre your pivot point to object in Max. I recommend checking this tutorial out.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iXoG2kNe5Ok

3D motive have a bunch of free tutorials that are really useful. Hope this helps.

ScottHoneycutt

Thanks for the input. While I get where you are coming from thats actually the opposite of what I wanted to do. I believe I "may" have figured out the solution. I realized you can double click to get to the meshes properties, move down to the movement tab and type in "0" for the x,y,z coordinates. This places the pivot point at 0,0,0. I intentionally wanted the pivots away from the model so I could do something like this with ease ... so I don't have to replaced the scene in UDK after already carefully placing it in 3ds Max. HOWEVER, I am finding this method unreliable as the meshes are "slightly" off after doing this. Now They are slightly off, need to be adjusted, but the pivots are away from them, making it hard to move them carefully from across the other side of the screen! I couldn't find the original posts I found in my research. As you pointed out, 3ds Max to UDK does this pivot point change for you (which i admittedly forgot about) which made it pointless for me to change it to 0,0,0 in 3ds Max myself (unless you are placing the meshes to center of it, which I am not).

As for the scene I will have a pic tonight. For now I'm still just troubleshooting. Some of the bakes needed to be redone.

I'm thinking the materials shouldn't need to be that complex here. It's just a bunker. You shouldn't need to see yourself in anything except maybe the TV and radar screens.

ScottHoneycutt

I believe I am finally ready to paint. Note that I do have soft edges around the walls/ceiling, but it probably won't be noticeable after some good lighting/AO in the scene. I won't worry about it much in the future unless I know it will be seen.

Edit: .

ScottHoneycutt

I'm expecting to remake the materials of this piece with PBR sometime in the near future. In the meantime I'm asking for any and all crits on the piece. I will likely redo the bed with a 3ds cloth sim and possibly the chair. I will fix the models, bakes and UV before any new materials are made. I'm guessing the model doesn't need much work as this is meant to be seen primarily from this distance (There are a lot of small knobs and such which aren't well detailed ... Would you agree that they only need to read correctly material-wise?).

I'm also considering changing the concept a bit to reflect a survival-horror genre.