Hello there polycounters.

I've been trying out the UDK over the past week or so. And I've been loving it so far! I've started a sci-fi based level in the hope to eventually put that in my portfolio. I need to start doing something sometime, right?

The entire level, with the exception of the floor tiles, is currently just to block out the scene, and are in no way finished. There not even UV unwrapped, so I don't think I can build proper a proper lightmass.

The only things here that are not mine are the plants in the background of the second image. Along with the ground texture they're sitting on, and the skydome.

Here's my progress so far;





Minotaur0's Hi-tech research facility has been a huge inspiration for me with this, and it's been my main motivation to get off my lazy ass (well, figure of speech), and actually start doing something useful.

Also, feels good to finally do something in 3D I feel I can actually be proud of.

keep going!!!

looks cool bro, want to see where this goes

Ooh, motivation! Thanks guys!

I've thought some more about the setting and all. I've decided on some kind of outpost on a forest planet. Looking out into the extremely dense jungle, and in the giant dome I had planned, you can see massive trees outside.

I've drawn out a quick floorplan, which is in no way final (mostly the dead ends on corridors). But it should give you some idea about the approximate layout.



And the little experiment I had done with a standard UDK tree, which sadly is the only one of it's kind in the standard assets. I'm hoping to eventually model my own proper trees like this, but I've never tried anything like that, so who knows what'll come of it.

Anyway, here's a screenshot from the test.

ooh I like where this is going, keep it up man!

I'm currently working on tiles for the kitchen and messhall. Which is a pain, because after blocking in most shapes you don't get that satisfying feeling of seeing everything coming together. The shapes are all planes so far. :P

I have run into a snag, which I may be able to solve easily, but I haven't tried that yet. The windows are supposed to contain airlock-style mechanisms inside (hence the groove all around), but I can't get enough control over movement inside UDK. In Blender, I can align everything to a proper grid and such, and it works perfectly. But UDK's grid is annoying, and I hate the fact that you can't change it.
The UDN already mentioned that most licensees use a scale of 100 UU = 1m. http://udn.epicgames.com/Three/UnrealUnits.html So what's up with not being able to change to a grid that suits that? Or just being able to define your own grid.

I'll just continue blocking out stuff now.

Hmm, the grid uses power of 2 numbers, so you can change the grid size to 1, 2 or 4 for example. Or, if you want more freedom/randomness, just toggle off the grid and you can move it any way you like. Could also go into the properties of an object and change its world coordinates to get it to move a specific range I believe.

The only thing you really need to know is more or less just that the character in ut3 is roughly 96 units high. And because of the perspective normal measurements doesn't always work in ratio to the charachter. So just keep in mind what measurements your tileable objects are, and have them match up to the grid to save a bunch of trouble. And compare your props and models to a box or biped, depending on what app you use, and have it be 96 units tall. That way you'll be able to eyeball everything, and then do a check on it in the engine.

Hope I don't come off as rude here, I have no idea what level you're at with udk, so you might already know all this.

Btw though, it says 1 UU = 1cm, and you can change the grid to 1 unit

I know, and I've been using the grid everywhere really. It's just impossible to accurately line up those particular meshes this way. The power of 2 makes sense, but it would be a heck of a lot easier to work with something that resembles real world measurements. As that is what I, and I assume everyone here, relates to best.

Currently, I'm actually using 50UU = 1m. Which doesn't make any sense. But exporting from blender doing this is a bit confusing. I've been scaling up by a factor of 50 on each .fbx export. I should really just open that script up and change the default to 50...

I had started to work on a scale of 10 Blender Units = 1 meter, after my mesh got screwed up by removing doubles picking away the wrong verts. Though I haven't been really good at sticking with that.

Currently dumping some meshes into UDK to block it out a bit. And it seems awefully spacey at the moment...

Try to make your blocks fit into a power of two grid first. Most of the blocks I'm using are 256 units wide/tall, but I'm using a player height of 144 units (close to Gears of War's metrics, where the character's height it at 160 units).

Default UT3 player height is 96 afaik, so blocks of 128x128 or 192x192 uu would fit the grid a lot better than 50uu ones =)

I'm currently completely reorganising my files. And also reexporting everything to 1 BU = 1m = 64UU. It's a pain, and it means I've got to restart with the scene. But I think it'll be worth it. I think I'll also have to redo alot of meshes because the scale is going to far bigger on some things. The roof is probably something like 8 meters above the ground.

I'll update when I've reexported, reimported and piece together the entire scene from the ground up. With a few added meshes.

Mentlegen! Update time.
After spending like a total of 5 hours doing maintenance on my files and such. Everything is not at a scale of 1 Blender Unit = 1 Meter = 64 Unreal Units. Not everything is perfect though. The walls and supports are pretty much all around 5.6 BU tall, and thus 358,4 UU. Not so fun for lining up BSP meshes properly, so I'm going to redo those heights. Maybe turn them into 5.5m tall things. That'll make em line up at 352UU. Oh well, I'll see.

I had organised every file to a 'Bulk Import' style folder structure. Which suits it. But importing in bulk kept crashing UDK, so I could never finish that. Some files just crash on import, and reimporting (when assets are used) crashes pretty much always.

I'll live.

In the meantime enjoy. It's my brothers birthday today, so I'll be occupied with celebrating that. Poor guy has school till 4.





Hehe, lunchtime:

I've heard that really thin triangles are a bad thing. I think I know why, but I'm not sure.
Anyway, what path should I take here? Either longer strips, or like 6 more tri's.



It's not just about this example, so I'm not sure where to pick what. If somebody could tell me what they base their decisions on, I'd appreciate it.


Well, I've been working on the airlocks inside the windows. I've been working with the idea of everything being created with the intention of easy (dis)assembling. So in this case I've been creating little icons in PS to put in the texture, illustrating how to install and remove these panels. It's fun imagining how they would install and remove these things. And it helps with texturing alot.

Update time. I've been working steadily on this stuff. Today was wasted mostly on getting the corners to look right. I just saw that this picture has some error on the right cornerpiece. I'll work on that then.



Today wasn't really productive... Oh well, better luck tomorrow.

And as always, any crits are definately welcome!

This is looking cool. Really digged the shot looking outside with the vegetation. Are you planning to do more with the lighting? I think some better lighting will benefit the scene a little bit.

triangles arnt bad at all, for high poly modeling they are bad, not for low poly mesh

I'm definately going to do more with the lighting. It's currently just working lights really. I'm still pretty much blocking in the scene. I've got a fairly good idea how everything will be laid out, but I work on highpoly objects alot inbetween block-in sessions.

Short-ish attention span with those things. Always skipping to the fun bits.

Originally Posted by Daniel Doerksen

triangles arnt bad at all, for high poly modeling they are bad, not for low poly mesh

I know that, but the question was aimed specifically at the use of 'thin' triangles. I heard that those were more difficult to render for the GPU.

if you really wanted to know if it was better to split it you'd have to do some tests, but since its a portfolio piece, I don't think it matters too much either way.

Hey Divine Rage,

Just a couple questions regarding the scene if you dont mind me asking. How much thought have you put inot the level itself? looking at the screen shots you posted it seems to be a lot of trial and error which is a good learning experience but wastes a lot of your time which could be better used on making the level assets themselves.

Before starting any scene I try to get a basic understanding of what I want, in your case you look like you want to create a sci-fi scene wich is a good choice as there is alot of art reference you can pull from.

Once the genre/art style is chosen I would start looking at reference material such as games, movies and even famous sci-fi artist, at that point i would make a folder on my desktop and throw anything i see that catches my eye into that folder.

At this point I either work off a concept in the folder itself or design my own concept with the references i collected in mind. This simple process of putting some extra effort into the early stages of your project can save you time but can also increase the quality of your work 10-fold.

As of right now your stuff is decent but could be greatly improved if some more thought is put into it.

Here are some links to sci-fi pieces that i think are awesome:

http://cghub.com/files/Image/050001-...6_realsize.jpg

http://cghub.com/files/Image/018001-...1_realsize.jpg

http://cghub.com/files/Image/022001-.../372_large.jpg

http://cghub.com/files/Image/061001-...3_realsize.jpg

http://cghub.com/files/Image/020001-...5_realsize.jpg

Hope it helps man!

Cheers,

Arman

its reminding me of Kamino from StarWars. want to see it when its done

@ZacD,
You're right, it doesn't matter much now. I thought that if it was indeed a big deal people would've told me so, and I'd have learned another bit.

@ae.,
I haven't put that much thought in it, concept-wise. But I have a good idea what I want this to become. And I do check out my reference folder on a regular basis. Got some great stuff in there that's a very good inspiration if I'm stuck and/or out of ideas.

Then again, I have to stress that almost every mesh is just a quick base. I'm currently already modelling highpoly versions for them. While I still don't have basemeshes for everything. That's probably a bad choice. But I'll see what comes of it.
Texture-wise, the only things that are done are normalmaps and ao bakes. They may not even be final for most. Diffuse/spec textures are untouched altogether.

Those are definately some kick-ass concepts! Saved em, ofcourse.

Ooh, look, shadows!

I baked lightmass once, and it was horribly slow. It looked reasonable, but not real good (it was only preview quality). And aside from that I really didn't get my head around those generate unique UV's for lightmapping. I assume I can use my own UV layout for that? Should I then just create an identical (in most cases) lightmap UV?

It sucks that currently my normals are pretty much invisible. I need to get better lighting in here.

This is very nice work. I love how not only does it promote a safe indoors feeling,but that it is also very open to the nature around it.

Coming along nicely. Are you going to make your own foliage for the finished scene? or are you going to just use epic's set?

I'm certainly going to try and make my own foliage. But as I've never done so before, I'll see where I end up.

I'm really digging this, kinda of has a Final Fantasy 8/Star Trek feel to it.