Hey guys, this is a UDK project I've been working on. It's still a work in progress but I'm open to suggestions and criticism, let me know what you think.

Current Progress:


Concept:

NICE.

Work on adding in the lighting and the proper water shaders and bamboo trees.

Are you using DX11 for reflections?

My major suggestion is to make sure to capture those subtle green tints in the walls and reflections; they really give a warmth to the scene.

Looks damn good so far, I especially like your rock garden.

Looking great! What I would like to see are the lights that go along the bottom of the wall. Also the grid spacing on your floor is a bit larger than the lines on the concept, might be something worth playing around with.

Good work, looking pretty solid so far.

Two things that really stuck out for me are the quality of the textures on the rocks in the zen garden (both on the ground and the individual rocks) are pretty blurry and need work.

The other is the walls, in the concept they have much more rounded corners then what you have now.

Just a small update for this weekend. Haven't had as much time as I'd hoped for the past week. Notable changes include: increased rock texture quality, light strips added underneath upper walls, tweaked the zen garden textures, light beams added to lower walls, tweaked floor texture, placeholder background added.

@Computron: For the moment I'm using regular screen capture actors and some nodes in the material to control the reflection distortion.

Thanks for the tips guys, I appreciate your insight!

mmmm....so many hours on this map playin halo 2...Are you planning on doing the entire scene or just this area?

nice, looking sweet. is the architecture in the background a matte painting or actual meshes?

one thing i noticed is your center circle part is smaller than the concept version. This is the focal point of the piece so you might want to make it bigger so it can have the appropriate amount of trees and space taken up in the composition.

@darbeenbo: I usually set my own deadlines for projects, this way I can move on to different things. Due to these time constraints I won't be doing the whole map, just everything seen in the concept piece.

@Macattackk: Thanks for the suggestion, I'll scale it accordingly before doing the trees.

The background in the distance is a static mesh plane with a screenshot of New Alexandria from Halo Reach. This is just a placeholder for the moment.

Also, what would be the best way of achieving this kind of light effect in UDK for my floor?

You really got to experiment with lighting if your just starting out. The concept seems to show several strong narrow point lights under the paneling, but its not apparent where the light source is. The floors are a highly specular material, so your going to want to put a couple point lights or spot lights close to the ground in the corners to get accurate reflections. Maybe model in the light sources into your panels.

You could also try to make a strip of gradients for an emmisive texture, map it to the panel and turn on baked lighting for it. Same for the large pillars. I

Not actual Ivory Tower (Ivory Tower is a different map- palm trees, stucco walls, etc.) but it's still looking good so far. The lighting seems a little off, especially being so dark and yet those pillars on the side are glowing like they're a neon sign. Unless there's some big spotlight in the foreground, they probably shouldn't be glowing like that.

Added the trees, I'm still tweaking the lighting. I re-sized the center garden and pool to be a bit larger. The water texture has been tweaked as well.

scale on those trees seems too big. lighting needs to be stronger. Definitely got past 0-1 brightness, get some HDR.

Thanks for the suggestions and comments everyone. Here's the final screenshot, I'm calling this one finished for now.

nice you might need to get some sort of rim light shader working on those bamboo trees and the water in order to get the effect in the concept?