Week 2- So much done already, More to do!

Week 2-Still nothing in UDK

We have seriously speed this process up because materialising and texturing objects can consume a lot of vital time. Daniel still didn't do anything in UDK apart from complaining it keeps crashing which I think is a very bad excuse for not working. He can't even block out anything using place-holders or any of the UDK meshes so when we give him the textured and finished model he can easily replace it. I wanted to model everything first then texture it all that way it makes the process a lot faster. 

Because our idea for the game is right in front of us modelling the college got easier by taking pictures for the reference. I focused on getting the small things in the room first which are repeated all over the college. Above is a picture of the wire clips in the room you can see there are so many in my scene. This is because I always take the back seat in the room because it has the best place to look at the room from, I can see everything in the room from that row. Using some images and live reference I created the clips in the exact places which most of them are. Some of the clips are put because I couldn't see that particular part of the roof. So I made it up by guessing where it could be. 

I made the pipes to very close to how they are in college, we need the room looking exactly like how it is in reality. So again using pictures and compiling the room using some of the meshes Azam has provided me with I created the roof of the room because I already have the main walls in the room done.Some of the pipes gave me a lot of problems like the pipe on top of the projector. Which has a very unusual bend, so looking at the pictures and in college i made the exact same replica of the pipe, although I skipped modelling the projector because it's very complex so instead of not including it I made it look like as if it dropped or got robbed. By leaving out some random wires.

Azam gave me the file for the pillar so using that i moved forward and using the pillars i made the correct length of the room because there is only 5 pillars in the room so stacking them correctly i rectified the sizes and some of the other objects. I still don't know if all of this hard-work and detail will be visible to the player because it's a horror themed game now we can't have the whole roof lit just because of the detail. It would blow the game and take away most of the horror feeling.

The plugs were too high res in poly-count for a plug. So i fixed and took away a lot of the extra vertices which didn't add any detail, but one problem this would create in the future when in game is that the model creates some light bleeding errors. So instead of doing a automatic mapping on the plug I decided to create proper uv's for the plug so it doesn't mess up that much.

One thing i already knew about unreal is that anything which doesn't require different colours on a section of a mesh doesn't have to have proper uv's neither a proper texture map. Unreal can texture a lot of models with just using the material editor and nothing else. But to do this the object requires proper material ID's which I don't know how to create in Maya so I researched a lot about this and found out that 3Ds Max can create material ID's very easily without much hassle, so after i create and finish a object and i create the UV's for the mesh by using a automatic UV mapping function within Maya; then I send it to 3Ds Max and by selecting the faces which will have another type of material or colour in the mesh I set the material ID's. This way it saves a lot of time for creating proper UV's than texturing it. 

I did this with a lot of objects such as the chair below and a lot of other objects. To do this i first send a object to Max and than by selecting the faces of the object i click on assign selection with material, to this i first have to create a multi/sub material node in the material editor. The worse thing about this is that when a object has its edges softened from Maya, 3Ds Max seems to undo this process, this makes another long procedure of reimporting into Maya and softening the edges again.

Luckily there is a good option created from autodesk to send the connected object back and forth from Maya and Max. This eased this problem a lot. 

I didn't know how to create windows in Unreal so instead of waiting to find out; very simple boxes within maya corresponding with the length and width of the windows. There was some minor sizing problems involved but it wasn't long before I overcame them.

This is a wire created from the CV curve tool in Maya because it makes life a lot easier when creating wire like objects like how i have just below. I created the curve first than positioned it how I needed it; then by making a cylinder and lowering its sub-divisions I extruded the top face while selecting the curve and increasing the sub-divisions of the extrude to make it look realistic.