Maffy Lees ~ Third Year

In this project I have faced a few problems but have been able to overcome all of them, I have learnt a lot of new skills and how to do different things on UDK and 3D Studio Max. Overall I have enjoyed this project but felt that it was a bit too long near the end and started to get a bit fed up of it! Thankfully I had chosen a topic that I have always been interested in, so even in my breaks from work I was watching films and tv dramas that were set in manor houses so could be classed as research. This project has literally taken over my life for the past few months, resulting in me rarely leaving the house, so I think that after I have handed this in (and celebrated with my classmates) I will be living in the gym, but my main focus will be finding a job! I have already been working on my CV, covering letter and portfolio website to build more of a professional image, but I will put a lot more focus into these and finding a job will be my job for the moment. I am really lookin...

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)

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!

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...

  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...

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...

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...

I had one of my last presentations in front of my uni class the other day and I received a few pieces of feedback to help me with my level. One of the main things was that the Victorian wallpaper texture on the walls in the sitting room was too big and bold. I experimented with scaling it so that the pattern was smaller and more frequent, but it still didn’t look quite right. I had another look at my reference images and realised that most of the sitting rooms seem to be wallpapered with a simple tiling pattern or just painted a neutral colour like white or light blue. I used the plaster texture on the walls and then tried the wallpaper texture on the sofas and curtains instead. I feel that this looks much better, and with some additional paintings on the walls will provide the correct look and feel of the room. A lot of my assets were the wrong size, such as the grandfather clock and dining room table, making the player look child size which I scarily didn’t notice before. ...

Lately I have been very busy with unwrapping and texturing, I will admit that this isn’t one of my favourite things to do, but my level is gradually looking better with the more things that are textured correctly.  I have been making the stealable assets this week also, but still would like to figure out how to make them look more obvious, like a sparkly outline around the items when the player gets close, so they know what they can and cant steal, alternatively doing this may be too cheesy and may not go with the look and feel of the level. I have made a few potted plants to go around my level but am having problems with my alpha texture. For some reason the leaves that are behind are clipping through the leaves on the front, I am unsure how to fix this, I’m sure that it will probably just be a simple fix like a tick box but I haven’t found a solution yet. 

I found a reasonably easy tutorial online that got the torch working with the desired movement by adding a light as a weapon. It does require some coding, but the tutorial supplies you with all the code needed so it isn't too bad. I think that I will have to include a note in my files when I hand in this project to uni, instructing to put the extra file into the UDK folder, otherwise my torch will not work and the player won't be able to see anything in the level. The code that was supplied in this tutorial created an error when I tried opening UDK, which admittedly made me panic a little at first as I have no experience with game coding. However, I read the error message and figured out for myself that one of the lines of code was on the wrong line. The message was asking me to provide a name for the new "weapon", which was on the line underneath, so I put the name on the same line of text and it then worked perfectly. I then used Kismet to attach this "we...

Other than creating a lot more assets for my level, I have been working a lot in UDK itself to make my game work how I would like it to. I had problems for a while trying to figure out how to get the player to “steal” items, and finding a tutorial online was proving more difficult as I didn’t know the correct term to search for. I have found over the years that if you don’t know the correct word, then you won’t find what you’re looking for. However, I figured that I was thinking about this completely the wrong way, in that I was looking for “picking up” items or “stealing” items, but really all I wanted was the item to disappear when the player activated it. Once I had figured this out, I realised that maybe the item itself didn’t need to be taken, but it needed to appear that it was gone. I then just set up a simple Kismet table with a Matinee “visibility animation” attached to a trigger on the asset. To create the right feel to the level, I made the whole level completely dark by...

  I have put most of my untextured assets into UDK to see what they will look like as a scene and if they are the correct scale etc. I found that most things looked correct until I realised that I hadn’t changed the game mode, which was a bit of a noob mistake. Changing the game mode then meant that the player size had changed making my level look too big and adding a gun that I didn’t need. I fixed these problems by finding a few UDK console commands and then adding them to Kismet under the “level loaded” box.  I changed the player size, the camera perspective and hid the gun. Making the secret door was easy, it’s just a simple Matinee animation, moving the bookcase asset to the side, the trigger is on a marble bust at the other end of the library. I found out that there is another Kismet function that displays any text on the screen, so when the player gets near the bust a message saying “Press E to activate” appears on screen. I would like to add an animation to...

Recently I have been like an asset making machine, I have really been enjoying sitting in front of 3D Studio Max and churning out various assets for my level. I feel like I am definitely getting a lot faster with building in 3D and I am pleased with most of the things that I have made. My level was looking very sparse but hopefully once I have put all of these assets into my level, then it will look more like a manor house. I am not really looking forward to unwrapping or texturing some of these assets though as some have very rounded parts that will be difficult to unwrap neatly. I am going to pay more attention to making my unwraps a lot neater in this project though, as I feel that has let me down in past projects, although looking at my assets now, most of them will share the same tileable textures of wood or gold. I made a paint-over of my library, as I couldn't get the ceiling to look right, by doing my paint-over, I realised that the ceiling wasn't high enou...

An important part to any level is getting the white box done correctly, so that you can plan where all of the entrances and exits are and how you would lead the player around the level. Being a manor house, the design of the level isn't too difficult, most manor houses are all about symmetry with the doors and windows, even if they don't lead anywhere and are only for decoration. I used my floor plan to help me create my white box and I will use my white box to create my walls, floors and ceilings from, I may also do paint-overs on my white box to figure out colour schemes etc, but the overall shape and layout of the rooms won't change very much from this plan. I have recorded me building a few of my assets and put them on to YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/maffkins