Maffy Lees ~ Third Year

Posts

References Used Throughout This Project

Manors Visited: Highclere Castle – Newbury, England Wollaton Hall – Nottingham, England Windsor Castle – Windsor , England Greenway House – Devon, England Catherine Palace – St. Petersburg, Russia Hermitage Museum – St. Petersburg, Russia Books Read: Blenheim Palace Guide Book Althorp House Guide Book Wollaton Hall and the Willoughby Family - Pamela Marshall Castles and Houses Websites Used: General 3D and UDK Help: http://www.digitaltutors.com Flashlight Tutorial: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nUhNISTX_tQ Various Forum Discussions: www.polycount.com Various Forum Discussions: http://forums.epicgames.com Royalty Free sounds: soundbible.com Soundjay.com Freeplaymusic.com Convert mp3 sounds to wav: http://media.io/ Media Watched: Pride and Prejudice (Film) Death Comes to Pemberly (TV Drama) Downton Abbey (TV Drama) Poirot (TV Drama) Mr.Selfridge (TV Drama)

Final Major Project [Post 15] ~ Final Test Before Hand-in

It is the Friday before I have to hand in my project so I decided to travel to Leicester to test if my level works on the University computers. Thankfully it has worked perfectly so the only things I have to do now is create my fly-through, get some professional looking print-screens and burn my disc ready for hand-in. I will be glad to see the back of this project but I have actually really enjoyed it and I'm actually surprised with the amount that I have achieved on my own. I'm definitely glad that I chose to create an environment about a subject that I was interested in, as it has made the project a lot more enjoyable. I can't wait to hand this in and post this onto my portfolio, I am proud of it and want to show it off!

Final Major Project [Post 14] ~ Smashed Windows and Ridiculously Large Cushions

I finally got round to creating the smashed window in the hall, (to signify the player has broken in) it was simple enough to do but to add a bit more atmosphere I decided to put some rain outside. Instead of using a particle effect that I am quite familiar with, I created this rain on an animated material to teach myself something new. I was really pleased with the outcome and feel that it makes the windows themselves more interesting and draws more attention to the smash. I had the usual problems with the fact that the rain used alpha and so was impossible to actually select in the normal UDK view, and because I have a lot of assets in my level now, its quite difficult to distinguish in wire frame view. I had a slight problem with UDK itself at this point, because I'm not very familiar with actually building things in the engine as I generally just import my own assets that I have built in 3DS Max. Unlike every single program that I have used in the past, UD...

Final Major Project [Post 13] ~ Pretty Glowy Things

This week I have mainly just been finishing off everything and making sure everything looks good, I redid the walls in the hall to be more efficient, and made a new texture for the lower part of the walls. Every time I looked at the brickwork on the hall walls I just felt that it never really looked right, I was happy with the normal and specular but not the diffuse. I painted over my diffuse to make it less saturated and more of a brown colour rather than grey. This has made the room feel a lot warmer in my opinion and it compliments the new wallpaper in the seated area quite nicely. I am quite happy with this room now, but I feel that maybe it needs more things in it to make it less empty. I have been researching a lot about animating a glowy material for my logs and embers in the fireplaces and I finally found a solution. Most of the techniques I found previously, required a matinee animation and I thought that there must be a different way to do this, as I have seen...

Final Major Project [Post 12] ~ Redesigned Rooms and Scary Portraits

Here is a video showing what my level currently looks like, it shows the working doors, new library key actions and more stealable things. As I briefly mentioned in one of my past posts, I have been moving assets about to create more interesting layouts, the most noticeable are the sitting room and the library. I have added more chairs and rugs to the sitting room to make it more cosy and less empty feeling, I would like to experiment with the chairs some more to make them look more impressive, maybe play around with some normal maps. I have recently picked up a copy of NDO2 so this might be a good program to use for this sort of thing, but we shall see as I have never used it before. I will also add some mirrors to the walls in the sitting room as manor houses often did this to make the rooms look bigger. In the library I put more focus into the seating area, adding a chaise longue and moving some of the bookcases around. I changed some of the colours of the books a...

Final Major Project [Post 11] ~ Working Locks and Melting Brains

I finally found a way to get my library door/key to work correctly, it took a lot of researching and random testing but it finally has the desired effect! Now the player can approach the library door, it wont open but will display [Door Locked] on screen, until the player gets the key. The key is in one of the drawers in the dining room that open when you get near. I had a problem here with the key in the drawer, if the player didn’t pick up the key once the drawer had been open and then closed again, the key would stay floating and clipping through the front of the drawer. I tried a few ways of fixing this but the more I did to it, the worse it got (key was now reappearing and floating in place when player had collected key, secondary key would not go away.) So I took a small break, watched a brain-melting episode of Jeremy Kyle and then came back to the problem, for some reason I managed to fix it straight away, its like all of a sudden it made sense to me. It is very importan...