Monday 30 April 2012

Blog Catch Up


Fixing the Concorde

Spent quite a lot of time just trying to fix the appearance of the Concorde. As suggested I tried re-triangulating the areas which had dodgy geometry as it is shown by the reflections in-engine . Unfortunately it did very little to improve the appearance and in some cases made things worse. I intended to have the engine hatch open and close but I had to give up on that feature as having the hatch as rebuilding the engine from scratch with this feature would take up more time than I should be spending on the Concorde.


Just when I thought I had dealt with the awkward geometry the light mapping does some weird crap on me. It looked better without the lightmap so should this problem continue I’ll just adjust the settings so that the mesh doesn’t have one.

Revised Scaffolding & Improved Lighting


Not so dark anymore and redid the scaffolding to make it look more interesting and complex. I experienced a bit of frame-rate stutter to begin with so I spent a while optimising the lightmass settings. Fun Fact: the ceiling lights don't actually contribute anything to the overall lighting in the environment, having them all emit light will result in a nasty bloom. It also pushed the building time in UDK past the 3min mark which was undesirable.

Monday 26 March 2012

Progress So Far...

Several updates since the last blog post. Most of the texturing for the Concorde is done using a 2048x2048, though lot more work is needed for the landing-gear bay since it's looking very empty. Did a little work with the shaders in UDK to give the Concorde a reflective look however...

Friday 2 March 2012

Texture Resolution



Begun working on textures for the concorde and done a few simple experiments. The screencap above is using a 1024x1024 tga and as can you can see it looks blurry. Below is using 2048x2048 and shows some significant improvement but when up close it's still no good. After some research I learnt that UDK can handle a maximum of 4096x4096 textures but I feel that's a bit overkill. With a bit of clever unwraping I'm confident I can produce a good diffuse map just with 2048x2048 resolution, but if need be I can try sneek in a 4096x2048.