Portfolio showpiece

[Piranhi]

I've decided to try and push myself to the limit in the next couple of months as I won't be at uni much longer and I want a reasonably sized portfolio when I leave. I also wanted to try and push the engine to the limit and see how much I could get out of it. As it stands now, the map is around 60-70% complete, and it has over 12,000 assets, just under 6 millions triangles but only 170,000 of those are unique, which shows how many different objects I've used. I've also implemented some unrealscript so that I have fish and birds circling the sky. I had to take the speedtree's out of this build as they were causing me problems, although I did a fresh reinstall of UDK so it might be fixed now.

I'm hoping to have it finished in the next month but I am quite enjoying unrealscript now and I know if I leave it, I'll just forget it

Anyway, here are a couple of screenshots, you can find more, and my blog here: http://project-artus.blogspot.com/

Cheers

[SHOT]http://img683.imageshack.us/img683/9544/ld1h.jpg[/SHOT][SHOT]http://img641.imageshack.us/img641/1073/ld2b.jpg[/SHOT][SHOT]http://img651.imageshack.us/img651/2708/ld3m.jpg[/SHOT][SHOT]http://img193.imageshack.us/img193/2125/ld4xp.jpg[/SHOT][SHOT]http://img3.imageshack.us/img3/3018/ld5g.jpg[/SHOT][SHOT]http://img716.imageshack.us/img716/248/ld6.jpg[/SHOT][SHOT]http://img716.imageshack.us/img716/4754/ld7.jpg[/SHOT][SHOT]http://img694.imageshack.us/img694/4168/ld8.jpg[/SHOT][SHOT]http://img693.imageshack.us/img693/5460/ld9.jpg[/SHOT][SHOT]http://img687.imageshack.us/img687/5764/ld10.jpg[/SHOT]

[DELTATHUND3R]

looks great...nice lighting..Looking forward too seeing more.

[LeECO]

love the lighting and sky :X

[prophet64]

Pretty **** amazing, that first structure looks crazy! Bloom might be a bit excessive but it might mellow out when you've populated the entire level. It's huge as well, any chance of a video?

[Piranhi]

Cheers, I'll get a video uploaded when it's near completion, it's still pretty bare and unfinished atm.

Changed the lighting to come from the front of the building, knocked all my lightmaps down while I'm building because it was crashing

[SHOT]http://img202.imageshack.us/img202/3690/ld3q.jpg[/SHOT][SHOT]http://img535.imageshack.us/img535/174/ld2.jpg[/SHOT][SHOT]http://img25.imageshack.us/img25/8306/ld1l.jpg[/SHOT]

[SageHunter]

Everything looks awesome. The one thing that bugs me is the very flat ground, but I suppose that will be fixed later on

[McTavish]

Everything looks awesome. The one thing that bugs me is the very flat ground, but I suppose that will be fixed later on

I like the flat ground, gives the scene more Scale i think

[SageHunter]

Well I like it being flat. But it's too flat. Like a solid ground plane. I mean sand can't possibly be perfectly flat

[Brokenteddy]

Beautiful work, interesting perspective as it seems you've gone all the way on the environmental work and the level design. Is this part of a larger game or a multiplayer map?

Anyways, lovely stuff and keep it up!

[Piranhi]

The ground, /facepalm. I split it into levels before I rebuilt it and it must have reset all the vertex painting lol. Oh well, I'll have that in my next screenshot, it's meant to be a tiled sandy floor.

@Brokenteddy, I built it solely for my portfolio although I would love to make a level out of it one day.

And thanks for the comments

[Drevlin]

Looks good man, nice stuff. Only crit is that I am missing smaller props. You got some really nice base geometry in there (and with base, i dont mean basic. Again, really nice stuff) but it feels a bit empty.

[Piranhi]

Cheers bud. Yeah I usually put down the large stuff, get the initial layout, then the smaller stuff, then assets like foliage, volumetrics, then lights and finish off with sounds and volumes. I'm a about 60-70% of the way through getting the initial layout sorted at the moment.

[Drevlin]

Interesting!
I usually do a lighting pass as soon as i possibly can, i find that it helps set the mood.

[Piranhi]

Yeah I definitely agree with you there, plus it can give you a big moral boost, especially when you come from unlit to lit and the detail pops out.

I did an initial lighting pass in the beginning, but I've left it since then. So I pretty much have the global lighting setup, I just mean lights from other sources around the scene.

[Piranhi]

Quick update. I think I'm actually going to have to get rid of some of the level. It's just crashing after every build, just after the lightmass has finished calculating. I can only stop it by bringing down the lightmaps which makes it really dark in some places, maybe I pushed the engine, more likely my computer a little too far. I thought 8 gb of ram would have been fine

I'm pretty much done with the big stuff, now I can add the layers of detail because as it stands it's still pretty bland and there's not a tree in sight!

[SHOT]http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_sVR-706LXoo/S6vjHYChO_I/AAAAAAAAA10/hq-VEXnm3DE/s1600/ld5.jpg[/SHOT]
[SHOT]http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_sVR-706LXoo/S6vjFExzRlI/AAAAAAAAA1s/WDq2ncFFaD0/s1600/ld4.jpg[/SHOT]
[SHOT]http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_sVR-706LXoo/S6vjCW3CeNI/AAAAAAAAA1k/6he4Lgbmc8w/s1600/ld3.jpg[/SHOT]
[SHOT]http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_sVR-706LXoo/S6vi-GDjmAI/AAAAAAAAA1U/4RFsM5yza-A/s1600/ld1.jpg[/SHOT]
[SHOT]http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_sVR-706LXoo/S6vjJw-aRSI/AAAAAAAAA18/goajoL5kyM4/s1600/LD6.jpg[/SHOT]
[SHOT]http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_sVR-706LXoo/S6vi_4aQqqI/AAAAAAAAA1c/RjhEGVd2SXo/s1600/ld2.jpg[/SHOT]