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.