Learning to work with Unreal

[Black_Stormy]

Hi there, first post here, haven't even been lurking long.

I've been working with the Source engine for a few tormented years and I finally decided to try out a modern engine. Seeing all the pretty environments people have been making in UE3 gave me a nudge towards unreal.

I downloaded the april release and immediately fell in love with Epic Citadel. That is such a great art style, I love it. Haven't seen anything made that nice in Source, that's for sure.

So to teach myself the engine, I decided to do a little scene, made with as many custom assets as possible. I'm going to use this thread as a diary/wip thread, I hope no one minds.

What I have so far:

[SHOT]http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-RYoHsYmkGY0/TlyGnyllXDI/AAAAAAAAAEc/JC2vmlM_HAA/s1600/udkfirstcustom2.png[/SHOT]

[SHOT]http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-JWO5NYyqNDY/Tlybzzn0xSI/AAAAAAAAAEk/mnI7txtLdBo/s1600/carriagethingowip1.png[/SHOT]

The vehicle is sitting around 9500 quads, I'll be baking down some of it but the poly goal is around 10000 tris. If I cbf I'll make it a drivable vehicle, but I don't know how much that entails yet. At the moment the goal is to make something pretty, not particularly playable.

I'll be posting updates here as I do them.

[Black_Stormy]

[shot]http://img153.imageshack.us/img153/3695/inengineao1.png[/shot]

[shot]http://img101.imageshack.us/img101/1294/inengineao2.png[/shot]

Unwrapped and baked the ao on the carriage, and made a little milk crate and some milk bottles. I'll have to look into breakable props I guess. But first I need to texture a bit.

[Cryslin]

You know what? I really like this do hicky driving device. Very creative. If you get it to drive, that would be awesome. Don't drive yourself crazy getting it together and looking perfect. To me just looking at it, it kind of tells a story. Sounds weird, but I immediately think of an invention game, of some sort. I will post later, for more comment, either way, great job.

[Black_Stormy]

Managed to return to this, however briefly. I think I have the hang of static meshes down pat, going to look at physics properties and stuff like that next.

[shot]http://img7.imageshack.us/img7/6302/notherupdate.png[/shot]

I'll colour it soon, hopefully.

[Boshko Savich]

Keep up ur work man. Looks good to me, only this thing about 9500 quads, sounds a lot to me, i believe u can do some improvement using normal maps and get things more round and also i we found that Smooth modifier in Max makes miracles after all u can see pillars in my vid what is maded from just 6 polygons.

[Black_Stormy]

Thanks mate, I'm using blender, so instead of smooth modifier we have edgesplit and subsurf but I think the idea is the same. The woodgrain normal map on the post is a highpoly mesh with subsurf applied, and then baked to the game mesh. I finished colouring it, though I think it might need to be balanced a bit once the scene starts coming together, it's quite garish at the moment:

[shot]http://www.modelsforthemasses.com/images/showoffs/coloured.png[/shot]