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, UDK doesn't recognise Ctrl+A as Select All, and instead drops whatever material you have selected down on where the UDK box is. Unknown to me, I tried selecting my level by pressing Ctrl+A, it didn't work so I thought it didn't actually do anything, turns out I had actually made it rain in my dining room! After a lot of frustration to figure out how to get rid of said rain, I realise this was actually quite funny and at least I know how to fix this in the future if I accidentally try and use short cut keys.

Other than just general re-texturing of things and adding some more stealable assets, I don't really have much to write about, I am really just doing the finishing touches to my level. I have finished most things and am very happy with what I have made.

On another note, when I imported my re-textured cushions they were bigger than the chairs, which made no sense whatsoever, I re-imported them again and they were the correct size. I think I may have found a problem with either exporting from 3D Studio Max or importing into UDK.

What?

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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 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...

Rooftop Project ~ Post 2

How the Level Was Made (Continued): I made a springy chicken ride that I wanted to be interactive; I struggled quite a lot with finding the correct thing to search Google for to make this work. All I want it to do is I want the base to stay stationary on the floor and the chicken to move on the spring when the player walks into it or tries to jump on it. I ended up using the InterativeFoliageActor which worked very well apart from the base also springed around all over the place through the floor, and the collision on the chicken had disappeared, so the player can just walk straight through it. I fixed this problem simply by deleting the base off the chicken mesh, and making a separate base with an invisible barrier collision going up through the chicken mesh. After doing some research on what playground items would be around In Tudor times I leant that the only fun past time they actually had was things like skittles and hoopla, so I added some skittles and a ball made of pigskin....

Maffy Lees ~ Third Year

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