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.