Texturing

A nice little discovery:

After a few attempts at texturing and getting the hang of patterns and shadows etc, messing about with the way things look in 2D vs 3D, I've found a nice way of creating a mock-up bump map. If you add a layer of very dark speckeled shapes, relevant to the texture (shadows) and a very light one (highlights), it looks a lot more detailed than just letting Photoshop try to do it for you.

Here on the left is my 1st (lazy) attempt, and on the right is the revised version:

Getting there!

More progress. All the chess pieces are made, and UVW uwrapped in 3DsMax so the black and white marble textures don't look too stretched. I've made the backgammon board in Unreal architexture for simplicity, and a dice in 3DsMax:



I've spent several days starting to texture and light my rooms. I'm getting used to adding detailed textured to surfaces in Photoshop - that's nicely rewarding when put into 3DsMax and Unreal Ed, and actually looks like what it's supposed to, as opposed to just a colour. For the main building's architexture, I wanted to go for a classy, vegas look. So after a quick look around some online casino tours and videos of the Timesplitters 2 level 'Nightclub', which I remembered as having a similar colour scheme I had in mind, I knocked up a few wall tiles. Then made them blue for the poker room:



The poker table felt didn't take too long, having gotten used to textures. The main time expenditure was deciding on the font. Heres the two mostly finished rooms. The lighting is mostly temporary at the moment, and the objects have yet to be strategically placed, but you can get a feel of what they'll look like:

Got it!

After putting quite a few hours in today I think I've cracked the technique of creating a 3DsMax mesh, a Photoshop texture and combining them to make a whole object in Unreal Editor, to a decent standard.

I've created my poker chip mesh and all the coloured textures i need. I tried photographing real chips but the level of detail was far too poor, so I copied the design and created them in Photoshop instead. Here's a couple of piles of chips. The white stack is the size I'm going to use for a 1-jump-high platform:



One problem I did find was that exporting from Photoshop to DDS file, for some reason, lead to several patches of black pixels being placed in very inconvenient places! Fortunatly, as far as I am aware, and that my test runs have shown, Unreal Editor can import BMPs as UVW template textures as well. So that's what I've done. Here's a little example of the PSD looking nice, and the exported DDS, not:



Another issue I've noticed today is that just in the little test room I've made there are no less than 1200 polygons. So unless my level is less than 80 times larger than this tiny space, I'll need to reduce the number of polygona in my poker chip stacks. (my upper limit is 100,000 poly's)

Fantastic

Problem solved!
A little issue I was having with texturing my playing card static mesh. First, convert it into a brush like I did for the chess piece. Secondly, make sure the texture package containing the unwrapped, UVW map, DDS file I've used to texture the card, is SAVED!

Progress

Good stuff.
The decision to not go to the pub has proven to be a good one. Not only have I successfully imported that ellusive static mesh, but converted it into a brush and textured it.



This also highlighted an issue with my knight chess piece 3DMax mesh. I think when I attempted to mirror the horse's ears, I actually mirrored the whole thing and put 2 clones of the mesh on top of each other, but in exactly the same space. Apart from breaking the laws of virtual physics, this has taught me to build things properly, and not be lazy, as it often comes back to cause problems. So keep it simple all the way through, and you'll come out smiling!

Oh good, problems!

The problem:
I've expectedly run into problems exporting from 3DsMax (2008 version) to UnrealEditor (2004 version).

Symptoms:
I've built, in Max, my playing card mesh, the object which will act as a building block to most of my level's obstacles, barriers, walls etc, and built one of the chess pieces.
Having downloaded the 'ActorX' plugin to export these meshes from 3DsMax, inserted my target folder's path and mesh's file name, all I generate is a PSK file. Unreal Editor imports ASE files as static meshes.
I can export as an 'ASE, ASCII scene export' file from Max, not using the ActorX utility, and then import that file into Unreal Ed. This appears as an un-textured mesh. I can then select the texture seperatly by importing the DDS I used in Max, into the texture browser and copying that path into the static mesh browser. (phew) BUT - the texture dissappears at run time.

My Solution:
Ignore it for now and texture the chess piece with a nice bit of wood from my desk, coloured black and white in Photoshop:

Re-Design

Having re-read the brief, I decided to scrap the idea of 5 platforms and try and actually stick to the guidelines this time by fitting my ideas and theme into 5 ROOMS as the brief clearly states.
The pool table still is the main feature, acting as a central hub to draw players into the middle together. The backgammon board is the main feature in the room to the north, poker in the south, chess in the east and ...probably a mixture of all odd games in the western-most room as I can't think of another specific theme yet.



So having sketched out my 5 rooms on a basic plan, built a mockup in Unreal Editor and run around it a few times, it became very clear it was both too flat and too small. The re-sketch, re-design and re-build put the pool table hall and random room on a middle floor with the pool pockets dropping down into a lower floor containing the chess room. The backgammon and poker rooms formed the top floor and at the moment, both overlook the pool table. Although I think this may change as it makes being in the pool room (the room to which I am trying to draw players), a very bad idea:

OK, let's plan

Thats quite enough sketching for now. I have a solid(ish) theme. Now for the level layout. I need 5 seperate places. Here's draft #1:

A free-standing pool table, with balls and cues and a chess board as cover and ramps, is surrounded by 3 bars tools and a poker/general cards table, on which there are chips and cards providing cover. The 5 areas act as platforms; if you fail to use the jump pads well enough to land on them, you fall to your death.

Also, I was thinking about some environmental dangers on the pool table, where either the balls are movable and can crush players, or the cues can pot you into the holes and down into oblivion.

To the Sketch Pad!

I am not a great fan of sketching and being 'arty', but to make a big 3D environment I suppose I have to break out the pen and paper first.

After descovering that this doodling thing isn't so bad, and brainstorming with possible themes and objects I could place in rooms to provide cover, I landed on the idea of scaling everything up, 'Worms' or 'Micro Machines'-style, to make the player feel small. After all, why do a normal map? Everybody does normal, realistic maps.

The theme I'm thinking of consists of 10 foot high board game pieces and playing cards, resting on each other to form bunkers, walls and various FPS architecture and objects to fight around. I thought of building big chess pieces etc, in 3D Studio Max to import as static meshes ino Unreal Editor.

Here are a few of the evolving doodles, sketches of possible object formations and a quick possible 3DsMax knight piece: