Area population

I've spent some time populating the old area. Now I want to move on to the futuristic area, since it's completely empty. Some assets that I want to make are going to be reusable, so it should all work out in the end.

A very major issue I'm having at the moment is the fact that decals refuse to project on brush geometry. They do project on flat collision and terrain.
Hopefully I'll be able to fix this, or I'm screwed.

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Rowing, rowing down the stream.

I did quite a lot of different things in the past two or so weeks. For one, I tried to sort out the background of the level. Originally, I planned to have just planes with pre-rendered images on them, but it did not work that well - they were obviously flat. So I replaced them with some simple models.

As you can hopefully see, I refined the modern plaza area as well. I assume I'll be able to texture the area soon.
Most of the old buildings are textured now, but still I need more meshes to break up the area.

Another nice addition is the trees. The foliage movement was a bit tricky to work out. Three Vertex Paint modifiers stacked together and used as RGB channels? Really, was there no way to make it work with just one?
Some similar issues were happening to the cloth pieces I used for the scaffolding. I don't really get why the editor is so adamant on only working with the materials created in 3ds Max. Why should it care whether the material used for viewport display is physicalized? I understand that there is some optimization going on in the background, but it is very annoying when you have to spend an hour trying to solve some stupid problem instead of doing actual work.

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Yet another update

I probably should write slightly more often, but I keep forgetting about this blog. In any case, since last time I've added some materials to the buildings. I planned to use interchangeable texture sheets originally, but so far it seems like separate tileable materials are a better fit even if there is a small performance hit.

Figuring out the way maps work in CryEngine was definitely fun. I wonder who thought that it was a good idea to save displacement map as an alpha of an empty texture. It used to be an alpha of the normal map, which kind of makes sense, but apparently they wanted it to be a separate map. I wish I could just export specular, gloss and displacement maps as grayscale files, but oh well.
Additionally, there was a lot of glitches with how cubemaps worked. One of the issues included environment map rendering everything flat.

Luckily, this particular issue seems to have solved itself.
Additionally, I changed the museum building slightly, as well as added water. It's not like the player is going to see it a lot, but it is useful for the fly through video.

 

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Level layout

This update is a bit overdue, but better later than never, right? For the past week or so I've been working on getting a semi-final level layout finished. The main issue that people pointed out to me during the presentation was that the idea was not entirely clear yet. So I've built some rough modular dam pieces and the futuristic museum building. Not final models, I'm not exactly happy with them, but at least I was able to set up a level layout.

I plan to make some basic textures for the level so that it is not just white. I'll need to figure out a smart way to set it all up in order to be able to swap the materials around easily.

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Work in progress

I'm done modelling two out of three sets of main modular pieces. I'm pretty sure I'll be able to finish the last one in next week. Last Friday I found out that all 45° walls are shorter than they are supposed to be, and therefore the wall ring can not be closed. So I had to spend several hours fixing all existing models. The good news is that I can finally make some semblance of a district layout. I'll also will have to find a way to create slopes so that the level is not as flat as it is now.

The plan for the nearest future is to create that layout, finish the last set of modules, add some simple materials, and start making futuristic background assets. I need to break it up slightly, just for the sake of my sanity.

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A bit of 3D

There' has been a bit too much stuff to do besides FMP work, but I believe I've managed to get quite a bit of work done. The building modules were remade to fit CryEngine grid, and some actual details have been modelled. Main issue with these is to make all the pieces fit together without gaps. In the beginning I defined standard size of the individual modules of the house. However, it causes issues with roof, curb and road pieces, as they don't necessarily fit the building in the end. All because of the underlying measurement issues.
In any case, after making some compromises everything fits, and quite a lot of building shapes can be achieved with this kit.

Modelling process is not especially challenging, but rather... tedious? There is quite a lot of repetitive work. It should become much more fun once I get to make decoration elements.

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Engine troubles

I've spent some time trying to make the dynamic lighting work in UDK. Well, it does work, but the quality makes me want to tear my eyes out. I tweaked the various settings of the lights and objects in editor, I tried disabling end enabling features in the .ini file, but all this resulted in choppy, pixelated shadow.
Tired of all this, I exported my pieces into CryEngine. Interestingly enough, I ran into a lot of the same issues with the shadows there - some of them are simply incorrect, some are choppy, and the draw distance quality decrease is very obvious.. But still, everything looks much, much better - modules stick together seamlessly, and there is no chopping of the shadows. And I did not ven tweak the quality yet.

I'm losing the amazing material editor, but lighting is quite important after all. I'm also not that familiar with the editor, so I'll have to catch up. Luckily, I'm not going to have to use the terrain features, as most of my work will consist of importing models in and sticking them together.

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