Lots of Unreal fun!(?)

Spent a lot of time this week trying to make some progress on my map, its the biggest part of my project and id only got a few placeholders in so for starters i carried on making the background landscape for my area aswell as playing the 2nd island in the game (this is where you will pop up after the underground section probably not the greatest of screenshots but because my map is so large when i zoom out it starts forgetting to render all the water and it looks stupid but:


Ive done too much round the edges to screenshot it all but ive worked on the other side too behind the dam/apartment block to try and give it some depth ive added some bsp shaped bridges over the river leading off into more buildings, these are only temp until i find suitable meshes for them but its just to get an idea of the size/scale of things, ive also added a few more temp buildings and completely boarded off my play area so its a proper island now with boundries and needed something to fill the gap!


I've not taken enough screenshots of my progress but nevermind, i didnt want to attempt the buildings quite yet as i think im going to have a hard time making them not look crap! so ill open some of the premade maps in the editor and see if i can pick up any tips, im looking at you Heatray. So i thought id make a start on park, which as it stood was nothing more than a green block, the idea for my park is that its quite lush as its been abandoned for a while because of everything thats happened so the grass will have overgrown a little and will be popping up through the paths and things, ill also have rubbish scattered all over, probably a pond/a fountain feature and maybe some burning barrels at a later point when i get round to emitters, something that the bandits have set out.

So anything i added a foilage layer and selected a few meshes and got painting, changing the randomness and the scale of the grass meshes gave some interesting results and with some trees and lamposts added i came up with something like this:


Which i think looks pretty good since theres still no proper lighting. I also added a pond area with some overgrown bushes and things around the edges, i may work on this later, i may change the water or add some more greenary but for now im quite pleased with the result:



And finally for the park the fountain/main area in the central part of the park, i changed the orignal bsp into a round concrete fountain with the some gargoyles and waterfalls with the overgrown bushes around the edges i think it stands out pretty well (bare in mind all of these in game shots launched through the editor are only 640x480? so when ive finished the map and cooked it i should be able to take some better shots in 1920x1200 with all the settings ramped up.



Well i couldnt resist and i had a crack at some buildings, my earlier attempts i havent even screenshotted they looked so bad i deleted the bsp's and tried to forget i ever did them, they just looked like cubes randomly dotted around so after researching some premade maps i see they make walls up purely of static meshes combining different packages to give some interesting results, so i had a crack myself and came up with



Which actually came out well, im not sure exactly what its suppose to be but the dragon and the pillars give it quite a futuristic feel i think, it doesnt matter as you wont be able to enter them, if i can make a few more like this, some garages, maybe abandoned warehouses that u can actually enter with machinery in? that could work i think, ive seen some futuristic screens on walls and bus stops and theres quite a lot more of these lights that i think add to the time zone, well at least with the meshes i have available to me, its 2009 and we still have buildings around in main parts of town from 1900's and earlier so i dont think it would be unreasonable to have buildings from 2000-2050 in the late 2100's anyway!

Boundries!

I was looking at my map thinking where to begin and the outskirts was really annoying me..all very flat and nothing but a skydome for miles so i thought id try and fill out the edges with some messhes after finding some meshes i thought suited i set off trying to block off areas so ive put some buildings in place with some waterfalls in front of them..looks a little plain at the moment but hopefully in the right lighting when its dark and rainy..and theres some emitters where the waterfall hits the river to give it a realistic look it should look a lot better

Now although it looks alright zoomed in..in reality you only see

But nevermind..as thats all this was meant to be ..something in the distance to block the edges off.

I played around with some more meshes even using ones that look from a different package however they are not, unfortunatly they dont have the same light emitter so im not sure if they will stay but for now im still just placing things in and seeing how it looks, ive also played with some walls to try and help with the scale, its hard to figure out..you look fairly close but it does take ages if u try and run there so i guess its realistic:

The shiny water despite thinking id hit the jackpot finding it was starting to annoy me, it was too clean and didnt look that realistic, when your river floods its not going to be tap water is it, so i went on the hunt for something else while trying to fill up the outskirts even more, its starting to look quite good now i think: