Ludus DVD + Cinematic

The DVD design is finished, and the Cover+DVD with the cinematic on it was handed up Monday when it was due. Unfortunately I had to rush the cinematic quite a bit more than what I wanted, so its very much lacking polish. Didnt have a choice however, I had to hand it up how it was because I was out of time.
This means I wont be uploading the final cinematic for at least another week, as I need to work on it some more first.

Heres some pics of the DVD










Next up Im doing the final part of the project, an A2 poster.
Cant wait to finish this and get back to some Blender projects!

Thoughts on 3DsMax + More screenshots

First up, some more screenshots (even some interior shots) over in the thread at GameArtists.net.
I mentioned in the post how I failed at implementing most of the decals, some kind of lighting issues going on which I dont have the time to look into fixing right now, so most of the decals I made were just a waste of time. *sigh*


Onto current thoughts on 3DsMax (beware, long and drawn out):
So Ive been using 3dsMax pretty extensively the past few months and I cant help but compare it to Blender in several ways.



Its been painful getting into it, but Im slowly getting the hang of using 3DsMax to model and UV map basic objects. It bugs me however, doing anything seems to be overly 'bulky' and/or 'slow'. Ive put most of that down to me not being experienced with Max, anyone familiar with a 3D program will know that they each have their own little tricks and quirks, and once youve gotten to know the program well enough everything starts to flow better. But even telling myself this all the time, I still feel like my inexperience with Max isnt the whole problem. I have after-all been using it for months and know the in's and out's of modeling simple objects with it reasonably well. But for me it seems non-intuitive.
Nothing seems to be in the place you automatically think it should be, or even the next place you think it should be. Max seems to be the product of getting a bunch of uninspired programmers in one room to throw together a program, no consideration for the artists at all.

Sometimes even simple tasks take a whole lot of (seemingly) unnecessary steps. For example adding a new face requires you to find the correct panel, make sure your in face mode, scroll down to the panel within the panel which has a button labeled 'create', activate the button, then the viewport suddenly has verts appear (even though your in face mode) and then the user must individually click every single vert, plus the first vert again just to create the face.

In Blender you select 4 or 3 verts, then press 'F' and the face (either a tri or quad) is created. Done - easy - it makes sense and is super quick. (theres also a button in the UI which does this, but the hotkey is slightly faster)

Another example is UV-unwrapping a complicated object.
First you need to choose the correct option from the modifiers (theres about 5 different UV mapping modifiers here), then change the modifier into face mode (hidden in the modifier stack), activate 'Select by element' in selection parameters panel, press the big 'Edit' button in parameters to bring up the UV window, all going well you can then use Mapping>Flatten map to get some kind of flattened UV map. No idea about making seams for the UVs however, didnt have the time to try to work that one out properly, as it proved to be more frustrating than a simple unwrap of the object to begin with.

Blender however, select the object, tab into edit mode, select all faces, press U (or unwrap in the side toolbar), select method of unwrapping from the dropdown. You then instantly have the UV's flattened out and viewable in the UV window. Seams are as simple as selecting an edge and using the shortcut Ctrl+E to either mark or clear a seam, or again the button(s) in the tool panel.

Again, maybe its mostly a lack of practice and instruction in 3dsMax on my part. But it doesnt take much effort, after using both programs, to see which is geared more towards efficiency and less frustration for the artists.


Additionally I found that 3Dsmax sucked up ram to a point where I couldnt have it running at the same time as UDK (which is also pretty intensive on system resources). This lead me to having to import into Blender the initial Ludus model I made in 3dsMax, so I could have an interactive 3D version of the Ludus to refer to as I blocked out the level in UDK.
Along with all this, 3dsMax takes 2-3mins to boot up on my system, Blender takes 2-3 seconds.
3DsMax 2011 student version - 1.53GB, Blender 2.57 - 74MB



And I still remember the days when Blender was <20MB....

Final week progress

Got less than a week remaining for this project to wrap up (at least the major cinematic part, theres still one part of the project to do later but thats not so much 3D related)



The ludus is coming together well, Im just about finished making assets now, and the level has been rebuilt a bit for some extra rooms and the staircase connecting the ground level with the top, plus its all pretty much furnished as best as I can with the remaining time Ive had to work on it. Im starting on the new camera angles now for the full cinematic which will be rendered using Manitee.
I also spent a bit of time yesterday making a ton of decals. They should liven up the bland walls and texturing. Soon we'll be seeing walls with damage and chipped away surface, or the occasional stains, grime and blood splatters.

Last night I also got around to making a full 360 terrain object complete with mountains, which really adds to the overall environment. The terrain was modeled in Blender in about 10mins (would have had a migraine trying to do it in 3dsmax, Ill get to that in my next post)
Then I slapped on some rocky texture, which didnt really cover it properly (lots of stretching) but it doesn't matter because all of this will be in the distance, and UDK's DOF blurs the distant mountains anyway.


(thats the Ludus in the bottom right)

Ludus Asset Development

With the main level design out of the way and the teaser rendered out at a decent level of quality, Im now focusing a lot on creating assets for the level. My main concern at the moment is that its a bit too bland and undetailed.
Ill be spending all of this week and some of next week going though a relatively large list of objects Ive written up, its been slow progress to begin with, but I think Im finally at a stage where my workflow is pretty fast and efficient.

Heres my custom asset folder slowly being populated:

And some arrange for a screenshot:


Note that all of these assets have at least one low poly mesh, a collision mesh, UVW mapping and one diffuse map (more will have normal maps if I have time and theres a few with multiple textures), so its taking quite some time per object to get it into UDK.

A lot of the objects also have hollowed out collision meshes- the pots, bowls and wooden barrels in the picture for example are hollow and can hold other items. You can see one of the barrels is filled with rigid body wooden swords, with the barrel in turn being rigid body as well. This means you can pick up the barrel and move it somewhere else in-game, with the ability to spill the swords everywhere if your not careful. Also if you accidently run into it, the barrel will fall over, roll around spilling its contents everywhere. I cant explain the amount of time Ive wasted running around a test area putting pots and things into barrels and then rolling them down a staircase or just throwing them to see what happens.
Thats one of the great things Ive discovered with UDK - when you think of something a bit tricky, all you have to do is approach the idea in a sensible way and UDK tends to work out exactly how youd want it to. BGE (blenders game engine which Ive been using for years) is a more primitive for some of these things. I could imagine similar ideas in BGE being a painful task. In UDK it just works as expected.

So for now Im just going to carry on though the long list of objects I need to make, but at least Im at the stage where I can get a model into UDK (start to finish) in pretty good time, everything that was slowing me down previously Ive managed to overcome and learn for the most part (like using 3dsmax's stupid UVW system)
Then mid next week Ill start putting the final composition together while adding final objects and polishing up the scene further.

UDK Level progress

So I spent a decent whole day working on this Tuesday (samples of raw footage were required for the university assignment Wednesday afternoon)
For the most part Ive finished the majority of the level design, lighting, basic details, postpro effects and managed to animate and test render some camera movements using Manitee.

Heres a teaser of some of the better external angles so far:



So whats left to do? - Polish and detail mostly. Theres a lot of objects I havent modeled and added to the level yet, some stock ones from UDK I want to replace with my own and a lot of the textures need rework and tweaking. Then its time to render some more interesting shots and compose the final cinematic.

Temporary front page is up!

Ive finally got around to getting a slightly better front page for the website up!
(before it was just the spinning 'Delta' logo)


The main site is under construction for now, but I still wanted somewhere for people to be able to see news and WIPs as things happen. Im not sure when the main site will be done, but Ill be working on it whenever I have time to spare.

And to announce all this I plan on doing the first part of a new video series on my youtube channel. Not sure when Ill get around to making that either, but the first episode should be pretty short and just news based, so sometime during May or early June I hope?

And how about a screen-capture, just for reference in the future: