3D and back to the paperwork

After the stress of the other week getting the map into some shape i havent worked on it much however i did try importing a model to see how it looks and although im gonna have to edit it and texture wrap it....well i think it looks alright, i had to turn the fog off just to see the damn thing but when its textured i can add lights so u can still see it..hopefully




Well i tried adding some lighting..it looks alright..unbuilt..but u build it and it goes to crap so ill just leave the unbuilt screenshot up till i fix it....looks quite close to the reference pic i think.







whyyyyyyyyyyyyyy!




paperwork to follow..

The update!

After the rush to get my map into some form for the presentation the lack of sleep..the wishing id never done unreal..yeah that

well heres some screenshots from where the map is now, the combination of the "ash fog" the temp lighting and lightmaps hating me makes some of them hard to make out...but i keep it looking like this even tho it can be quite hard to see as i can adjust my lighting accordingly and make materials brigther/whatever

nothing else to note..lot of bare places that need filling up with rubbles and barrels and whatever, also put a giant plane of water on the floor as the damn flooding and the constant rain would be a bit more than puddles i think!

Crop crop crop!

well i got my map into some sort of reasonable state for the presentations i heavily slapped on a height fog more than initially wanted but i think it might work, with a stack of large pointlight placeholders

however unreal engine doesnt seem to be the best of things for my large scale plan and i dont really want to drop the details down just to make a large area that looks like it was made in the 90's, my outer borders gone from about 200k to practically nothing..with the heavy fog i dont really need it, ive noticed when i build all now its only using 2gb max of ram where before it would hit 3.2gb and just crash so obviously my map was too big with the settings i had.

I've also split the 2nd "island" that u surface up after the underground thats going to be in a 3rd level and ill have to use level streaming, the idea would be that its all in 1 massive enviroment but thats just not happening in this buggy engine, it does mean however my "first" map isnt TOO far from being finished i guess, it still needs all the polish and some more details and buildings but its a hell of a lot closer now

All i do is work...god damn

Barely sleeping! Unreal is so time consuming, when that useless dissertations out the way i should be able to chill out a little as i can focus most of my efforts aimed at this


Im starting to wish i could work on another part of this but as its the presentation shortly i need something to actually show instead of making it up as i go so ive had to push on in unreal despite the fact im slowly going mad

Anyywway, after trying about 5 grass textures, trying some more advanced options in the material to get the grass to appear wet and rain hitting it..well i failed, the grass is better than the last one..looks quite realistic in the game, i had some that looked like cress and didnt take to being flattened too well but i think this ones the winner, however im not entirely happy with the material as of yet and dont even get me started on shadows.



Zoom out a bit to take in the lovely view of....a tiled rain mesh, that needs changing but in terms of the atmosphere i think its looking quite good, i think im going to need to add a very dim skylight back in at some point as where theres no light its just completely black and that isnt too accurate when u look up and see a dark blue/red sky, perhaps increasing the heightfog will work but i dont want to completely hide it and just up to see black, having pitch black areas might be realistic but ive spent hundreds of hours on this map and id like it to be seen even if its dark!



I got quite attached to that custom grass, ideally id have used a different engine, theres no way id have enough time to make all my own meshes even if i knew what to do before we started and other games would handle grass/this sort of map much better.

But that doesnt stop me making more custom materials, im learning what each thing does in the material editor..bit by bit and im screwing up less and getting some interesting results, but what this dark gritty abandoned city needs ..is graffiti!


I probably wont keep it there but u need to apply custom materials to somewhere in your map otherwise it just deletes them which is just a pain but i think it looks quite good i added the brick texture myself within the material editor so it looks like its actually painted on the bricks and not just a flat panel in front. Ill probably do quite a few more of these and signs and perhaps windows/other bricks just to bring the game up to a more realistic tone if possible.

I probably wont add anything else now till after monday ill probably be hanging somewhere due to my shadows not working

Why did i want to do lighting

So i was happy enough, finished a nice chunk of my buildings roughly till more detail later on, i want to get some lighting in to see how the atmosphere is, WHYYYY

I started in the park, some shadows on from a lampost down onto the grass in a night time scene, would look alright, well no

As i found out foliage layers dont take too kindly to lighting! so when i remove the skylight i got:



Theres no light, it should all be black but no the grass in the foliage layer doesnt do lighting...infact it just ignores it, i tried adding in a dark fog layer but still the grass shined out and totally ruined it.

Next up i hunted around for a mesh that accepted light after playing with materials for god knows how long, ok this one accepts light but now it runs like total crap

My PC is not slow, far from it but i had 14fps with 1 light in the area, something wasnt right, i found some console commands and brought up "stat engine" and found it was trying to render 500,000 foliage instances....rrrrightt.

Changed the mesh size and lowered the denisty by far, and the draw distance got it down to 40,000 but still it was chugging along which left me with no other choice but to ditch the layer entirely and leave myself with just a material which i wasnt happy about as unreal's grass textures are not very good for my type of enviroment i needed something more realistic looking so ive been making my own material with some textures, still trying out different grasses but the first one i made doesnt look too bad:



Its just a default light for now i was seeing how it looked, i dropped the scale down as far as it would go without it looking too obviously tiled and its not too bad but i think i can get a higher res texture, drop the pavement down so the grass looks like it has more depth.



Obviously the floors wrong but that isnt the point of this post, this is with a better light i hope, was seeing how it handles meshes, the game doesnt seem to like doing shadows, it could be a user error though, this doesnt look too bad with the light cone and the slight yellow tint not sure how final it is however. Ive also added a low density heightfog to darken the sky and the water down and overall drop the feeling to a late night/dark skies from the volcanic ash, maybe i can do something with the sky later on to simulate some black clouds im not sure if its even possible and its very far down on my list but its something to keep in mind if i have the time.

Ive also spent the last 4-5hrs sorting out my custom packages, now im starting to incorporate my own materials i wanted to make sure everything would work no matter what machine is was on as i remember issues from year 2 when some of us used this engine for our maps and some custom assets werent showing up. So i basically i rebuilt my custom package actually into the map so i only have 1 file to work with, all my assets now load where my terrain layer and light maps do, it also built 14 seconds quicker!..which may not sound much but when it only took 38 in the first place!

Final building roughly finished for one area

Well i wanted to finish the main block of buildings next to the park before i got some lighting in and each building took longer and longer trying to make it look different and not ...suck really

More random unlit shots:





The building through the editor view looks alright, adds some more height to the zone and looks fairly in place ! now to see in game:

Which looks right too i havent done anything like i did in ut2k4 and made a door which in reality was about 200 foot tall, size wise i think everything looks good



Random alley shot to show some depth of the place and to get the famous rain mesh in!

Next time ill have done some lights...or i hope so..i still need to pad out these areas with pipes/signs/rubbish/skips etc but at least i know the layout now

Definite Progress!

Staring to come together i think, joining up some of my buildings so it doesnt look too square with boring evenly spaced alleyways and i think its working out.
I changed the cinema..i dont even know why i call it a cinema it doesnt really look like how i imagined it but whatever, i made it a bit taller and changed some trim around so i could join it up to the building next door and the 2nd floor would be the same level, might still add another level to this building but that doesnt matter for now it does look neater now however.

Back over the other side near the delivery area ive added another building to the side of the last one i was working on, its getting quite hard to make things still look different without totally screwing everything up but i think this one works out ok as ive applied some stone trim over the windows which make them look different to them used elsewhere while still fitting in well.

Back over at the "cinema" i tidied up the crossing, i also tidied up the rooftop making the surface flat and adding all the trim, if i include ladders in the game the roof tops should be accessible due to how ive made them, i could also add planks of wood that the bandits used to cross to other buildings if they are not joined at the base.

And back over at my stone building, you know i could have organised these pictures better but its too lateeee! (its not i cant be bothered) we now have a fence in seperating the warehouse from the stone building i recently added, the hole in the fence is just the right size for the player to crouch through making it another passage, this is exactly what i wanted an open world but i want the player to find different routes around the enviroment instead of being forced into a linear path. Can also see ive added some trim on the floor which seperates the delivery bays and makes the world a bit less plain and boring.


This is round the corner from the stone building above, i spent many hours thinking how i could add some shape to the buildings and this is what i came up with, extending a previous building and adding some more upper floors angled and different to the ground floor it adds shape and depth instead of everything being flat but its most time consuming trying to tidy everything up and make it work

Hooray lets add my 1 rain mesh, and now it looks better still, im actually starting to like the look of my map even tho theres no lighting...its not going to look any worse when i add lighting so its a good sign, shame its already taking quite a while to build and it previews like crap even in 800x600 i think i have issues with the draw distance of my grass in the park area, but thats for later on.

Spooky alleyway!, stick a barrel in on fire and a tramp to jump out the door at me and id have a winner, but the tramps probably not happening, it should look quite good in the dark with a fire emitter however!

This is just a view from another side of the building above, not entirely sure if its gonna stay like this but i thought id add the meshes and see how the area looks, i think it could work but the base still needs work and i need to tidied it all up so the alleyway..is an alleyway..and not an odd shaped space where i messed up my measurements

The structures continue

Im really starting to hate unreal..you spend 12hrs in it look back and realise you've barely done anything, but..its too late to change now!

This building it was meant to be a cinema, i was thinking of having a 3rd tier with some lights on maybe, ive got the shape where i want , it just needs tuning when i get round to lighting and detail


Round the back of the newly made hotel i thought a delivery area would make sense and it fits in quite well i think


Now to bring in my 1 rain mesh! andd it looks much better i think, that car is used a lot as a rough scale measurement as things look so distorted in game if you run up to a door and go into 3rd person you look about 3ft tall but back in 1st person it seems right, so the car stays till the end, maybe it will find a place in the map somewhere, even if its on its roof trashed and on fire



This is round the other side of delivery warehouse, needed a logical place where people would enter so made some basic bsp shapes, added a few meshes and i think it looks about right in terms of scale, probably change the material round at a later date but i think it can stay



Well you saw the back of the hotel, i thought id go for a frontal, this building took me about 13hrs..i have no idea how or why, finding things that work, getting the sizes just right, making sure theres no big stupid gaps where you can see into space, it all adds up. not sure about the hotel light, that actually maybe something i design for myself when i do custom 3d work/materials perhaps, something to cover the front better, still needs tidying and a trim along the roof but its not bad i think.



So this is a top down view overlooking the area im working on, well the left section is the most important bit, i think 2 more good sized buildings will fit in the middle there leaving me with the other side or maybe ill start on higher detail/lighting for the left side, i need something worth showing for monday, the bsp shape on the right is where the underground entrance will be so i can see how much work space i have left on this island anyway (the other island i will probably just take copies of the buildings ive made change em around slightly and use them over there, its quite far away and it would take a while to get through the underground so you wouldnt remember anyway.

Work work work..buildings buildings buildings

I need to get at least this section of buildings complete..then i can get some lighting in..so on i go
Tidied up the area near the entrance to the apartment block, will tidy up more later on..some kerbs and bushes i would think..not even sure how bad this part will look when i get the water in from the roof so it might be a waste of time anyway

This is another section near the park that had quite a large gap so i thought a row of shops would work here, not sure how high this structure will go, possibly use the glass material and make it into a hotel .


I found a much better realistic floor material thats also "wet" so it looks quite good in the rain so i dragged my 1 rain mesh around for a quick look


This is just a gap between 2 of my buildings, i need to work out how big the alleyways will be to still look realistic when they have more detail in later on (rubbish bins/skips/barrels/gates etc)

Buildings take days!

I dont get where all my time goes, 10hrs a day and i barely see any improvement recently, im putting in a lot of work now so i can have some lighting in properly before the pres next week and when i see the lighting in hopefully ill feel more motivated to carry on as im getting sick of the hundreds of hours im spending in this buggy engine

but onwards! as im starting to pads things out its looking better



The building from earlier, changed the bottom floor tidied the centre up, this will be fine till i do a sweep later on adding finer detail, pipes/wires etc better than it was!

same goes for this one, tidied the bottom up changed some windows and added some trims to sort things out.


On the other side of the road this fits perfectly i think and works well at stopping the player running straight to the train station underground, it still needs a lot of sorting out along the bottom floor and some work to split the glass up but i think this fits the map good with the mix of newer structures and old brick ones.



see i almost have my main street done, still needs a lot of sorting out and the floor needs work before i can ever move onto finer detail and lighting but its better than it was last week.

Moar buildings!

Hadnt got much done over xmas due to having the client brief to get up to date finished and submited so this work took a back seat for a couple of works, however the client briefs out the way so its back to unreal!

As my park area was in a position where i was happy to leave it i now need to get the buildings sorted so i can get onto lighting/emitters and other effects to really add to the atmosphere, at the moment half the stuff im making looks like its covered in plastic wrap due to the editors one massive light ruining everything!

Anyway so progress updates, i was working on the main building, the apartment block/dam which needed some work to not make it just look like a massive cube, after a couple of days (yes i dont get how something like this takes so long..it just..does) i ended up with this:



I quite like the look of it, the dam would have been built much more closer to the present day the games set in so it should look more futuristic than other structures and i think it fits , the glass in the central structure is still way too bright as its taking reflection from the sky dome but when ive got the proper lighting in this should dim down and reflect its surroundings.

I thought i could add something to give the building some more features, since its a massive apartment complex i thought there should be somewhere for the owners vehicles to go (whatever they may be at the time) so i put in a row of garages at the bottom, gives the building a bit more variety, and ive also been trying out a few floor tiles in front of the complex.



Another building nearby, tried to make it look like an old structure thats been brought up todate with some more futuristic sections, looks quite good i think and goes well next to the apartment block



This is one side of the apartment block in game with a paved area for the vehicles to get back onto the road, few trees to make it look less plain and boring, eventually when its finished there should be barrels and colapsed pillars around, aswell as possible rubbish/fires or just water undecided as of now



Also working on a few other buildings slightly further away where the are slightly older but still with some futuristic features, its hard to tell how they are going to look until i get proper lighting in but i think they look alright, i need to start putting spaces in between the buildings as i want quite a few alleyways throughout the city block




This 2 need work on the bottom floors, i want them to look different to the higher floors, perhaps shops like 1 of my other buildings but they cant just be windows as round the back would be skips and possible garage doors which wouldnt work