Game Engines and Digital Graphics

Games Design and Digital Graphics

Modelling

Autodesk Maya provides all the tools for an artist to create the best of the best 3d models, animations, particles and a lot of other magnificent things. To model in Maya to create my game I used a lot of box modelling basically starting from a square which is a Maya primitive. Using this I made all of my models unless the model was a pipe which I used a cylinder for. Customising the amount of edges in the primitive at start than making modifications to the edges etc is the way I like to model. Maya provides the tools for a base shape of an object it’s not preferable for adding little details like scratches etc.

Rigging and Animating

I had to find a way to rig the custom characters we made in Maya and Zbrush, the character were made using Maya a base mesh which is from Zbrush because we didn't have a lot of time. I used the UTMale rig which is free from unreal's website, detaching that skin from the unreal's character and then adjusting some of the joints and than binding it to my character was the way I did it. My animating and rigging skills are very basic so the rig and the animations are very basic; the gangdum style animation at the end was downloaded and applied to my rig. The other animations are made by me and my brother using key frame.

UV’s

Once I make an object I than focus on getting the UV’s made for the object so it doesn't cause a lot of problems later which I have experienced numerous times with modelling. Creating the UV’s for the object is a challenge to optimize UV space and not overlap anything. 

Textures

After I modelled the base mesh and created the UV’s than I have to make the textures for the model, the easiest way to do this is to go in Photoshop and make the textures using a UV snapshot from Maya. The other way I textured models was by using Zbrush which can be sometimes faster to make the textures and the quality is also better because the textures are hand painted. After making the textures in Zbrush I have to bake the textures/normal maps to the UV’s, then export it as an OBJ into Maya. For final quick checks then exporting it as a FBX. The textures have to also be exported into Photoshop so I can export them as a tga. 

Export

The last part of the process is to export the object and I prefer to export the textures separately into UDK instead of embedding the media within the FBX export. The reason for this is that it makes it easier to identify which textures are making a good impact on the overall object. This leaves the option to use crazybump for a cleaner normal map or to use the one Zbrush generates. 

Import

Importing the object as a static mesh in UDK is easy but than to make it look the right way by using the material editor can be a real pain. UDK lets you use the same material for a pacific polygon count on a model. Doing this some of the objects did not need a texture map, so we just auto mapped the UV’s and then sending that object to 3Ds max and setting up material ids on the polygons which will have a different texture element.