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.

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...

Textureing + Additional Assets

Walkway

Texturing

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.

undercarriage wip

WIP

Walkway Continued

Made more segments of the walkway and exported them into the whitebox. The following screens demonstrate that the segments can seamlessly be placed together.

Walkway

 The walkway of the hangar are designed to be modular for ease of placement of each segment and so that it is customisable.

Scissor Lift

Misc Assets

Concorde WIP undercarriage + making more interesting plans

The wheels are probably too detailed, but I could use them to generate some normals to bake onto a lower poly set of wheels.The pictures below are the references I used to help model the landing gear parts. Regrettably I couldn't get any references of the gear in smaller seperate parts so I had to imagine what they would look like as I tried to interperate how each bit behaves in the system.

Concorde - Jet engine

Several changes were made to the wings to allow for the accurate alignment of the jet engine. Used the photos from the Duxford trip to help out.

Concorde

More work done on the Concorde, the wings were a bit tricky to model since they are slighly curved.

Whitebox Update

Added the various miscellaneous assets I made this week to the whitebox. Needed to widen the interior a bit to fit in the wall segments so it didn't feel so cramped.

Misc Assets

Misc. Assets

Wanted to have a break on the Concorde for a bit so I decided to work on some of the structual assets. The screenshot above is of a wall segment. Adding to the whitebox as soon as it's built.

Concorde - Body + Wings

More work done on the main body. Added the tail fin and currently working on the wings. I'll return to work more on the body to get it as accurate as possible.

Concorde Body

The nose went through several iterations before getting it's current state. The earlier iterations had unusual topology which were very apparent on the renders even with turbosmooth. Now working on the main body.

Concorde - Nose

Working on the nose on 3DS Max. Also did a little research into the nose droop mechanism, which would be neat to include.

http://www.concordesst.com/nose.html

Should be finished by tonight, afterwards I'll get around to modelling the body.

Also got the blueprints for the production model.

Updated Whitebox

Started working on the Concorde. The only good blueprints I could find were of the testing prototype, but I plan getting a model kit of the BA passenger model which should have the blueprints and the correct decals. Exported this current version of the Concorde into UDK as a placeholder.

The Concorde was larger than I expected so I had to expand the hangar to allow it to fit inside. It's about 62m x 10m x 25.5m in real life thus assuming 1UDK Unit = 1Max Units = 2cm so I modelled it approx so that the dimensions were around 3050 x 360 x 1360 Max units.

Duxford Visit