Final Entry

The scene is wrapped up and the portfolio shots are finished. looking back on the project it has been enjoyable. I've been able to work with new people and we've been able to cover different factors of development.
This has been the first environment I have worked on and I think it turned out pretty well, there are things that I am not happy with such as things we didn't get around to or things that simply had to be cut due to time restraints, but overall I am pleased, as a group I think we got the project done without hassle, so I am happy.

Here are a couple examples of the portfolio sheets;

Working from feedback

we have spent the past week tidying up the scene, making sure everything is as it should be. We have worked on the feedback Dave gave us last week.
I dealt with lighting, I found the problem was that point lights were affecting a much broader radius than what they needed, so the large amount of light sources resulted in something that wasn't very dark. to combat this I had to think about why something looks dark. in films they do not film in the dark, instead they use colours and contrast, so by making the point light radius smaller and only affecting a smaller area, the rest of the scene remains dark, while the points of interest are lit, heightening the contrast.

For the dirt, Chris created some good looking decals and splashed them about the level. I had learnt a little bit about post processing and decided to play around with tones and such and added a film grain to give a dirty, gritty overtone to the scene.

Unfortunately when it came to presenting for the last time, the lab machines had issues building lightmass, though Dave saw it in the editor and in real time without lightmass built, though that is not a proper representation of the final result. now all that is left is to work on the presentation of the hand in.

UDK continued

We have carried on working within UDK, the whole environment is textured now. We had our Lecturer have a quick play and view the scene. The feedback we got was that he was generally happy, apart from with the lighting as he found it too bright, and that the scene felt too clean, it needed to be dirtied up.

These are issues we are going to aim to solve, for next weeks presentation.

UDK

Myself and Chris have spent the past week flipping through UDK, Photoshop and Maya. the approach we've taken to texturing the environment is to use seperate uv sets to allow high res tiling textures. While Chris has been texturing and UVing a good portion of the scene, I have been setting up the lighting, fog, etc. I have also had a hand in the texturing, having done the corner store and the tall generic building, and creating the concrete textures.

the organised Maya file is working well, it has made texturing and alterations that much easier and has helped us share things a lot quicker.

The lighting is not yet final, we have a few light props in the scene that need to be imported, once these are brought in I can finish up on lighting. One thing I did find was that making a static mesh emit its own emmissive lighting isn't that great. a single object doing that has crippled the time it takes to build lightmass, and I find that controlling the actual light is quite hard. So I have taken to making any neons emmisive and to not emit static lighting, and instead use a point light in that area. Point lights are much easier to control and don't cripple the engine. If we were to use emmisive static lighting from every neon, we'd be looking at a very long lightmass build just to preview it.

Here are a couple of screens, the scene has changed a bit since these but my computer gets a bit upset with UDK. What we're basically doing now is finishing up any texturing on buildings that need doing. creating decals such as dirt, manholes, posters, grunge, and creating general props to litter the scene.