Race Car UVs

Today I leaned that Maya Bonus Tools don't work in Extension 2. This is probably for the best as doing UVs the proper way was probably a worthwhile learning experience. It took a little while, but was relatively stress free. I forgot to take pictures on the way, so these pictures are all of the final results.

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Model tuned with spoiler. Look at those clean clean lines. No retopoing here.

Collapsed a few lines on the bottom. It's not like I'm animating the underside.

UVs. I know some weird lines are straggling. Those are the inner linings of the windows where they were extruded inward. Would you say intruded? Probably not...

Probably definitely my final texture. Totally. What a beauty.

And here it is matched up to the UVs.

Finally a photoshop image with some basic colors painted under the UVs. I left the UV lines visible for now but they will be hidden for actual texturing.

My First Model

We did our first real modelling this week. It was... actually quite enjoyable. I won't call it easy, but a friendly artist showed me a few very useful tools and then I worked without getting distracted (no small feat) for 10 hours. I'm quite pleased with the result, particularly as I miss-sized a reference image and had to go with my intuition.

I didn't snap any pics of the first few steps so we're starting here where I'm sculpting a front window.

We had some extrusion trouble, because I was extruding relative to the world instead of the object (or vice versa, I can't honestly remember).

Headlights

Making it fit to the better image. You'll see my side image is too small.

This is before I worked the tail. I saved the end for last, so to speak.

Hood, why?

2 Wheels is plenty, my guy.

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Windows for seeing things.

I decided I wanted pretty lines and so I straightened everything out, all around. Glad I did, too.

Spoiler alert

Pretty close, chief.

There we go. Rims and everything.

And finally the one thing I forgot, the front window.

Pretty Pass

This week we went back and improved upon last week's level using asset packs and player feedback. A lot of my feedback revolved around lighting and platform speed. People also pointed out that my platforms flickered and it looked "weird" but I was unable to fix this. I changed the lighting, made it static, added more, and toned down the intensity of most of them. It helped make the area feel more full with real light instead of having extremely bright points in space.

I did a major terrain change for the level when I found the "Cave Entrance" in the Arid Desert asst pack. I decided that my level was not a random building in the desert, but built into a rocky outcropping in that desert. I wanted to cover everything in rock and sand, but at this point I was having trouble.

I realized I could add a second terrain piece and sculpt that over the top of the building.

I decided that I deserved some better textures, so I found some good ones in the Arid Desert pack, made a fresh set of layer blends, and got painting.

One criticism I got was that my finale didn't look like a finale. I was originally just 1 coin on top of the building. I made a new room, expanded the coin, and put a particle effect above so you knew, this is it!

Lighting was my biggest flaw in the previous pass so I had to make a major change. WHile these bubble look weird, I find them fun, and I'm glad I chose to use them as the fixed lights throughout the level. Again, I recognize that they don't make much sense.

Bubbles

Bubbles

Video:

Blueprints For Real

A second shot at blueprints. I think I actually learned something this time. It was a crazy struggle. this level took my more than 30 real work hours. however, a lot of that was either watching tutorials, rewatching tutorials, or struggling to find tutorials to teach me the things I didn't know. In the end I found that its easier to just grab a programmer and apply logic.

Terrain in the back, brushes in the front.

We have a lovely entrance. This includes the original stonework pattern on the ground before I started painting.

Soon to be moving platforms. For now, they are static and kinda ugly.

My original pressure plate. I went with the fancy scifi texture later as gold didn't really fit the scene.

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Making coins and portals

Door pt.1

Door pt.2

Suns out guns out

My first paint. I did the whole level in sandstone.

Much better.

3 of the eventual 7 moving platforms.

Ahhh real materials on my stuff, and the second floor is finally done (though it's empty inside for now.)

Not anymore.

Making walls move.

La grande finale

And most importantly, my vid:

https://youtu.be/EKVEAVXV1Ik

Terrain Time

This was a tough day in level design. What I worked on here is actually a first draft for a level of a capstone project. I won't spoil all the details, but it's a sports game with large asymmetrical real world levels. You'll be able to see the 2 goal zones around the castles and 3 kill zones on the 3 flat areas down below.

This map is inspired northern Germany, particularly the Bavarian alps and the castles situated therein. The 3 large flat spaces at the bottom of the level are frozen lakes, the rest of the area is mountainous rocky paths. The game deals a lot with movement and collision physics so the map is set up to allow people to knock things off ledges toward the kill zones, and to provide multiple choke points and potential paths to the goal zones at the far ends of the map. As a side note, all of the ramps and pathing was hand done, I didn't use the ramp tool at all as it looked too unnatural.

Sadly, a lot of my programming intentions fell through. The kill zones aren't working for the Ice pillars (which represent enemies), though I can switch the blueprint to have them kill the player.
The goal zones tick up your score but I have not gotten it to stay on the HUD for more than a few seconds. Most importantly, when you hit the IceFoes, they go flying and I cannot figure out how to reduce the impact. I've tried a few things like turning there weight up to 3 tonnes, but that didn't effect anything.

I'd like to come back and improve this when my knowledge of Unreal is equally improved.

An overview after the initial sculpting. From this distance a lot of the mountain ridges smooth out, but I believe that by this point I had already done most of them.

This is the forming of the cinner lakes and the choke points. From here you can see four ramps that lead down into the different lakes providing multiple options for attack.

I built a castle out of basic geometry. In game, this will be a spawn point and a goal zone.

There is no jumping in the game, so needless to say, I had to delete it.

This is my little score Blueprint. It's simple, but it works nicely. the other part is in the Level blueprint which uses an EventOnOverlap trigger.

A shooting gallery. That green sphere is a kill zone trigger.

I made the sky darker, and added a bit of blue to the skylight to make everything feel colder.

Looking into the basin.

Mah VID:

MineCraft Map

Dear professor Zuccarello, I know you said to start logging our time on the hw. I regret that I did not accurately log mine. However, I know that it has taken approximately 15 - 20 hours to make everything here including the UVs the textures, and the map itself. I have no sense of whether or not that is an appropriate amount of time. In any case, the following is a video capture of me traversing the level.

(Video Coming Soon)

And now for some build pictures, YAYYYYYYY! There are quite a few.

I snipped out the UV's of a beveled cube.

Then I used grid snapping to fill in all of the little hole and gaps.

This is the very start. I decided to build the cave from the inside out. Still haven't decided it if this was a good idea.

Getting a sense of scale, the cave is almost big enough.

Here we are on top, planning out the bottom of the upper pond.

Went back and made some mossy stones and then overdid it. Had to trim the hedges significantly.

Ahh, that's better. 

A river flows through here. Sadly, this river was neither opaque nor non-collidable. To solve opacity I had to make another base material. To fix collisions, I got to learn about the various selection tools. This was really REALLY useful info.

Built out my little lake and started thowing around massive chunks of grass (homemade).

A view of the whole map from the sky. Only one thing left to do.

Diamonds can be everyone's best friend when we oppose traditional gender roles!

You can also see an attempt at lighting.

I ended up needing another point light to make things look the way I wanted.

The point light did wonders to get that caverny feel, however I had to turn off emissives for this shot, and hence, the diamonds aren't shimmering the way the do in the final level.