Adam Make Fire

I wanted to add a little more life to my level and include light sources which aren't artificial. So I decided to add a barrel with a fire...

This is pretty much the final version of how the fire will appear in the level.

This is the material set up before it was used as a particle system. It consists of a lava texture with bump offset which pans through the fire to give it variation in the flames. I also added a panning  texture on the main flame so it isn't so obvious that the flame is just a repeated plane.

For the final touches I added a spot light, adjusting the colour and brightness to light up the area around the house. The warm colour from the fire is a nice contrast against the coldness of the environment. In game it also brings the level to life having movement

All I need to do now is to figure out how to make the light flicker, then I should be done!

My day in Cry Engine

For some unknown reason, I've been constantly switching back and forth between UDK and CryEngine since the start of my FMP.

And today was yet another day where i decided to try and use Cryengine... again

My days effort inside the engine

I got so far, but realised my terrain was too large, tried to resize it, Cry glitched out. Then i gave up and returned to UDK.

 I do think however UDK looks better for my environment. Particulary the soft, ambient shadows generated on meshes and in corners from the baked lighting. I also know UDK better so I have decided to definatley stick with this engine!

My level as it currently stands

Tree Progress

Nothing too exciting. Progress so far of tree creation, as the ones currently in my level look shite!

^ High Poly branches which will eventually be baked down to a plane.

progress

The grass mesh has now been set up with the foilage tool in UDK and placed throughout the level

My next step is to replace the tree's with a new version, because I feel they're letting the scene down a little. 

Fences & Grass

I've been working on a couple of assets to include in the surrounding area. The fence is made up of a single post and  few vriations of horizontal beams, which all share the same tileable texture. Exported as single assets, allowed me to create alot of variation producing an old rickety fence.

The grass is a high poly bake onto a texture sheet following a tutorial.(speant almost two days just making grass!)

Although its not finished yet, im pretty pleased with the results. The planes have been vertex painted so they will (hopefully) seem as though they are influenced by a light breeze.

Belated blog post

Recently I've been working on getting the majority of the exterior textured. To get  idea of what sort of colour scheme i was going to go with i did an (extremely) rough paintover of the exterior.

Its not the prettiest piece of work, but it gave me a rough idea of what i wanted to acheive.

I wanted the textures to be of a decent quality so i decided to put a fair amount of time into them. I (so far) have 3 diferent tileable textures for materials, brick, wood and slate.

Each tile was sculpted in Zbrush from a mesh created in 3dsmax then baked down onto a flat plane. The difuse map was created from phototextures alobng side with the Ambient Oclussion and other maps created from the bke, then a final height map was created from this to add extra detail to the normal. .

I also have another wood variation which is applied to the building with the red and white pannels.

These are the textures as they appear n engine. Im pleased with the results however the normal mp doesnt ppear as strong as i'd like it too. Im going to hve to look into a thing called bump offset to get the best result...

FMP_Derelict House

Progress so far...

I've mainly been working on the interior, but have made a few changes to the outside of the house. 

The main changes are to the colour of the sun to match the time of day in which the shadows are being cast, more tiles added with window pieces and a few more fine details added to areas such as under the balcony & porch. 

I've mainly been focusing on lighting the interior today. Before the house was extremely dark with little to no light bouncing through the rooms. 

My first attempt to create dynamic lighting was to adjust the world and light properties. However there's so much that can be adjusted which meant every time the lighting was changed, it had to be re-baked so the efffects could be seen properly. (waste of time)

The best way it seems is to add point lights inside the building by windows. This way I get much more control manipulating the settings until I get the perfect light balance within the image.