Rooftop Project ~ Post 1

Project Specifications:
Polygon Count: 20,000 triangles. 
Texture Space: 6 RGB textures @ 1024x1024 pixels square. 

Programs Used: 
3D Studio Max 2014, Adobe Photoshop CS6, Unreal Development Kit 07-2013
Project Brief Introduction:
My original idea for this project was to have a children’s playground on top of a school, sandwiched between bigger buildings. I would absolutely love to work on games such as the Elder Scrolls series or the Fable games, because I think that they are visually beautiful and have interesting level designs. So I decided I would tailor my rooftop towards the Fable franchise, I will still go for my playground idea but will make it in the Fable style.
The story behind my level will be: The player starts off as a poor street urchin child (a lot like in Fable 2), they can’t afford toys but there is a small playground on top of the roof of the school on the very edge of the rich part of town. The player must make their way across planks of wood and conveniently placed crates to access the playground, the items on the playground will be interactive.
How the Level Was Made:

I started this project off by blocking out the level in 3DSMax. I came up with the idea of there being three accessible rooftops to match the crowded Tudor feel of the streets in Fable, this also addresses the problem of the rooftops not being very big, and creates a bigger playable area. The big bell tower will add a more “wizardy-magic” feel to the level and the bell itself is suggesting that the building it is attached to is a school.  

The route of my level is the player will start on the lower roof of the L shaped house, jump down to the balcony below, carefully walk across the wooden plank bridge to the smaller house and climb up the ladder onto its roof. The player can’t get up any higher at this point so their only option is to jump down to the wooden balcony that surrounds the school, continue all the way round the building until they reach some crates at the other side of the bell tower. The player then jumps up the crates onto the sloped roof of the window and finally onto the playground roof, where they can interact with a number of the toys.
After testing out my route a few times in UDK, fixing all the ngons, smoothing groups and unwrapping on my main buildings, I then started making some assets that will be key to the overall feel and playability of the level. I had to decide what sort of toys I would have on my playground and how I would successfully match the Fable style. In my opinion Fable takes a lot of influence from the Tudor times, but still adds their own stylisation to it, not just in the look of some of the objects but they also “invent” some items that wouldn’t necessarily have been around in Tudor times, which in a way makes the idea almost steampunk. Looking at the things that are currently on playgrounds today, I feel that I could change how they look and they would fit in quite well with the style. For example, I remember when I was young there was a sort of running machine in my local park, made from two metal handles and a wooden barrel that would spin, allowing you to run on it on the spot, this could easily be stylised to fit into the Fable style.
One of my main concerns is that I won’t be able to get some of the things working in UDK as I would like, for example swings. I don’t think I could get the player to sit on a swing and to move back and forth without learning some kind of coding. I think this is a bit too advanced for me but I will try and do that sort of thing if I have time left over at the end. My main focus at the moment should be getting my level to look good and to ensure that the player can move correctly through the level.
Using one of the tutorials we were provided, to show us how to move doors when the player got close to them, using Kismet in UDK. I figured out how to apply movement to the bell in the tower, I changed it so that it was on a continuous moving loop and have it working as the level started. I had slight problems with the animation itself in the way that when it started and ended, there was a small but noticeable pause, but using Kismet wasn’t as difficult as I initially thought. 

I wanted a really nice shiny gold texture on my bell to make it stand out from beneath the metal fencing and look more realistic, I think this will also grab the player’s attention, hinting that it is the correct way to go. Using an online tutorial on www.digitaltutors.com, I managed to achieve the cheerful gold texture that I wanted. I learnt about making a material solely in UDK using colours, and the Fresnel and LinearInterpole tools. 
I thought I should concentrate more on the playground as this is the ultimate goal of my level. I made a barrel that the player can actually run on.
 I used the same Kismet and Matinee process that I used on the bell for this, but this time using a trigger placed on the very top of the barrel so that the player must jump on the barrel for it to work. I had a problem creating the barrel’s rotation in Matinee, for some reason if I rotated it any more than 90 degrees, it would fly around in different directions instead of rotating. I found out from Google that I needed to tick the “Use Quat Interpolation” button in the properties, and for some reason this fixed it! I think that UDK automatically tries to find the shortest route from A to B with its animation sequences, resulting in things not appearing how you would have liked, as far as I understand the Quad Interpolation button disables UDK from guessing in this situation.