work

hello! i know its past the deadline for hand-in (which i missed) but i thought id upload some work thats not yet made it up.

first of all you can see the material for a new mesh id created for my level; its a light to go in a mystical cave. what you can see below are the three textures of my own paseed through several filters to change the affect on the mesh's look. the colour map is connected to two multipliers which are in turn connect to the specular and diffuse channels. these give the mesh its colour and also its reflective qualities. the reason i did not make a specific specular map for this mesh is because i knew that the colour would work fine. the two vector constants connected to these multipliers decreases the colour saturation of the diffuse channel and blue the reflection on the mesh. the emissive channel is governed by a multiplier into which feed a texture and another constant3vector, and together control the the the runes glow on the outside of the mesh. the constant plugged into the specular power node gives the item a wide reflective angle. the normal map at the bottom gives detail to the mesh.



next you can see my first attempt at creating a custom particle system which i hoped would be smoke. you can see the rotator plugging into the texture sample channel causing it to rotate. this then plugs into both the diffuse and emissive channel causing a nice wobbley glow. the constants and depthbiasedalpha are supposed to control the alpha on the material however for some reason i could not get this to work as it was supposed to as can be seen two pictures down.





the above picture shows the UI for editing particle emitters. from the picture it is clear that the material sourced was inhibiting how the particle works and so i used a material already existing in unreal and made some changes to it in this editor; i gave it an orange glow instead of white and also affect the colour saturation of each particle of the course of its life. the results can be seen below.



the picture below show the mesh's with shaders applied to them. i then used the tools in maya to apply the textures i had created in zbrush to the model.



and below can be the resulting render.



i had originaly intended to get this character moving in maya but due to time constraints and several computer errors (lots of openGL error 14's) i no long thought this feasable.



the above picture shows some work ive done in maya using ncloth. the initial setup is relatively easy; merely selecting the relevent items and making one an ncloth object and another an ncloth passive object. then you must add several frame to allow time for the item to fall as well as heavily editing the options shown on the right of the above image. after this lengthy process i finaly attained a behaviour i liked from the material and exported the resulting mesh as an obj. i then textured it in zbrush before exporting it to unreal. the result was a table cloth drapped perfectly over my table mesh.

the crunch

i continued my work with maya and unreal by attempting to bind the character to a skeleton. as the unreal engine uses very specific coordinates for its rigging i had to download a 3ds max file already containing a skelten, export it as an .fbx file on a friends computer, import it into maya and then rebuild it as the process of moving it from application to application caused some of the bones to be imported as meshes.



however after dicovering the mesh requirements for such an action my in game character ha undergone a reddesign.







however i found that imprting the head (which had a high poly count) caused the engine to crash so temporary alterations were made.



i actualy really like the look of this character and it has inspired me to create a niche for it in my game as an anicient guardian used to protect magical places.

i used the following textures to all for easy placement of UV's that unreal can read easily.





however after trying two different methods for importing my character, both of which met with failure i am going to try using 3dsmax to export the meshes as this application communicates much easier with the unreal engine.



my level has also undergone a small rediesign; it now takes place in the realm of a god.



with all the recent failures i am feeling less than confident about my project in its final week than i wouldve have hoped or anticipated.

Unreal: update

The above picture shows my current progress adapting the model for the unreal engine. The last thing that remains to be done is some sculpting on the armour and the rigging. Following this process i will test the mesh in unreal before continuing to texture it in zBrush and then importing the textures to unreal.

Unreal importation

Having been working solidly on my design document for the last two weeks or i thought it was time to get back to my dude.



The above image shows the pieces i intended on creating the model for importing into unreal however research has shown that the mesh must be made up of specific parts so the model will require some redesign; the char will be topless but for a pair of metal pauldrons on each shoulder.

I intend on using nCloth for the maya render so i will need to use the full torso in order to get the proper effect. This will push up the poly count and will probably cause my laptop much death and overheating however i believe this necessary so that my rendered video will look at its best.