Home Unreal Engine

Need some help with ropes/chains/wires in UDK.

polycounter lvl 8
Offline / Send Message
gannonroader polycounter lvl 8
Hey guys, I was hoping someone here could maybe show me some tutorials on creating rope, chains or wires in the UDK. The udk forums are really slow to get a response, and I find pc's forumers much more willing to help beyond a one line answer.

I'm making telephone poles and I'm going to need to put some wires in there.

Replies

  • Ben Apuna
    Do you mean like dynamic ropes? or just static mesh?

    Static mesh would be modeled just like anything else, 3 or 4 sided cylinders. Draw a spline from one pole to another then extrude a 3 or 4 sided face along the spline. Duplicate if necessary and export as ASE.

    Or if they are far enough away from the camera alpha planes might work as well.
  • gannonroader
    Offline / Send Message
    gannonroader polycounter lvl 8
    nope I meant dynamic, and a guy at the udk forums showed me a good resource that steered me in the right direction, and I got one to work, but I'm having a problem now that maybe someone could answer quickly instead of me making a whole new thread about. Everytime I bring in a mesh, the pivot point is nowhere near the object, even though it's centered in max on export. Any idea what's going on there?
  • crazyfingers
    Offline / Send Message
    crazyfingers polycounter lvl 10
    Here's a technique i've picked up you might be able to use for rope. Model and UV your rope like a standard calendar, don't split it so it's just a very simple cylinder that has no horizontal splits. Create a tiling texture with stripes, just a flat black image that you've painted vertical white lines with a very soft brush. This'll be your base ambient occlusion and you can turn it into a normal map using the xnormal filter in photoshop. Now just go into your UV's and select the top vertices or bottom vertices and move them far to the side so that they tile the texture a lot to cause the vertical lines to be diagonal. Once that's done split the cylender as needed so that it can take a world space path deformer and be put on a spline.

    Here's the effect i got with rope, 256x256 textures:
    4051505473_730b0869b8_o.jpg

    The frizziness was a helix that a UV mapped on the z axis so the uv's just looked like a cicrle. The texture for that was just lots of lines that popped out from the middle.

    Lemme know if that makes sense, i can open the package and pull the textures out. The knots are the same cylender i used for the rope with extra loops on it that i put on the path of a torus loop.

    PS: ACII exported obects are based on world position, so before you export just punch in 0's at the bottem of the screen with movement selected, "w". This will ensure that the pivot point is the same as it's work position at export.
  • East
    Offline / Send Message
    East polycounter lvl 14
    Would you mind sharing the "good resource" this guy showed you?
  • gannonroader
    Offline / Send Message
    gannonroader polycounter lvl 8
    Sure, it's http://udn.epicgames.com/Three/VideoTutorials.html , and it's the Physics tutorial set. Inside the folder, theres 4 videos. The one that really answered my question was the video "setting up a physics asset".
  • gannonroader
    Offline / Send Message
    gannonroader polycounter lvl 8
    PS: ACII exported obects are based on world position, so before you export just punch in 0's at the bottem of the screen with movement selected, "w". This will ensure that the pivot point is the same as it's work position at export.


    Thanks man, i'm going to try this. I'll try to remember to post back on here on my next import to see if this works.
Sign In or Register to comment.