Sunday Wrap Up.

This weekend I (Olly) ended up shifting away from the text based HUD that had been giving the player information about Health, Ammo, Points and so on.

Today I felt that I would create a basic Scaleform HUD that we could easily create images for then replace my basic elements with.

So currently I have the logo resting on the left hand side and a health bar on the right, thanks to Scaleform I can have it moving on a Z plane.

You may also notice from that image that we now have our character in the game, I imported the skeletal mesh on Friday when Josh handed it over along with the animations, At first he didn't move but he was in the game.
Afterwards I set up the animations by importing all the characters animations into an AnimSet and then created the AnimTree to link all the animations up.

The next part will be importing the UV Textures and adding them to the character, from there we will then add in the gun and it's textures but I'll talk about that more when it's been done.

MONDAY

And here's what our HUD looks like today

We draw closer.....

Olly here, So I've worked a lot on the landscape since the last update, I've been following the following piece of concept art created by Kieran as a template for how the landscape should be looking for the player.

It's barren and dark, the landscape is rife with tears and lava spewing up to the surface along with jagged spikes that have broken the surface, So my task was to replicate this as close as possible to the concept.

The landscape is near completion and I'm feeling very certain that I have kept as close as I could to the original concept, here is an image of some of the spikes and lava near the main building.

The material that forms the landscape is made of 4 layers, the base ash texture that covers the terrain, a cracked rock texture that forms around the lava, a burnt black rock texture that shows dead lava areas or where lava has scorched and the lava texture itself, the following is and image of me working on a lava revine with the above material layers to give a realistic effect that sticks with the concept.

More information about this work will go onto my page "level design and programming" here on the blog.

Updates

Today I (Olly) decided to upgrade the game from the December build of UDK to the March version, the reason for this was due to graphical problems now plaguing the December build and plus I wanted to take advantage of the March build with it's Simplegon tools and better terrain tools.

Today has mostly consisted of transferring all our files over and making sure everything works, I also started working on our cover system and updating our post process effect system, below is a screen shot of the exterior of the building with updated lighting and PP in place.

The landscape and sky are placeholders for now, our own custom ones will be added in tomorrow once I'm done finalizing them, also have a few more textures to start importing in to become walls, floors, decals and static mesh textures, they too will most likely go in tomorrow.

Lava.

I worked on our lava material today, came up with this applied to a fluid actor that ripples in a frequency of 10 and at a speed of 0.4

Pipeline test run.

Today we decided to do a test run of how everything would run, So the idea was to concept a pillar, model it, texture it then import it into UDK.

All went extremely well, Kieran concepted a nice looking pillar in theme with our game, Josh then created said pillar and UV Un-wrapped it for Kieran to start texturing, meanwhile I grabbed my old lobby scene and made it look less crap.

After Kieran had finished the textures, both model and texture was given to me to import, Success! After applying some basic collisions and fixing scaling issues we had our first in-game asset, enjoy the following image of our success!

New Concepts!

Hey guys Kieran here, got some Drass concepts for you :P