So moving onto UDK, a program I’ve never used before
(besides play testing a racetrack created by an old friend for her project) I
was a expecting a massive headache navigating through the program and getting used to it's interface when I'm so used to 3DS Max!
It actually wasn’t all too bad really; it was much simpler that I
thought it would be (for now).
The tutorial I followed was easy to follow and I got the
hang of it rather quickly. The only problem though was that it took forever!
I
was just spending hours upon hours sitting in front of the computer importing
and linking Textures to Materials and creating new materials blah blah.
But first,
let me talk about the collision meshes.
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| Yay jump node! |
So because my intention was to be able to have access to the
second floor through the balcony with my trash pile serving as my platform (as
mentioned in part 1), I had to set the collision meshes much larger so that the
player wouldn’t be able to jump and fall through the building. As I was setting
the creating the collision mesh, I felt that the trash pile wouldn’t tall
enough for the player to jump off. I later thought that I could perhaps use one
of the blitz building’s fire escape ladders to climb up onto the fire escape
ledge and drop onto the balcony from there.
However the trash pile still wouldn’t
reach the fire escape ladder and that it was a little obscure for the player to
figure that out. So after lookingto what UDK can do, I stumbled across a
tutorial which let me creat a jump node.
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| Looks dangerous... |
This was perfect in letting me create a boost for the player
to land onto the fire escape ledge and dropping onto the balcony.
It may look a little out of place, but at least the player knows it exists and you can reach the second floor!
When creating the collision meshes for the interior, I asked
one of my lecturers If a standard plane can be used as a collision mesh. I was
pretty sure the answer was yes but when I came to it during play testing, the
collision for it didn’t work. It must have been an error on my part but one of
my colleagues mentions that it has to be a box of some kind. I’m not too sure,
but it’s something I’ll have to investigate further some in the future.
Anyways, after setting all of my collision meshes and naming
them appropriately, I moved onto saving everything down as an ASE file.
Now comes the point that took me the longest…
As I read the tutorial I followed it correctly and did
everything just right. And it said something a long the lines of “repeat this
for all other assets” or something. So that’s precisely what I did, I imported
the next mesh and named the mesh, imported the textures again and sorted them
out in to categories and then created materials and linked the textures to it in
which I then linked the materials to the assets. I repeated the process again
for the next mesh and textures, redragged the same textures and renamed them
like I did the other ones and made the materials, etc. This was taking me
forever, I was getting sick and tired of renaming everything the same thing
even though I have already imported the same textures and created the same
materials about 40 times!
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| A little dark... could do with some lights |
As I finally finished, I was relieved, and I started moving
onto putting everything onto the scene. As I was wondering how I was actually
meant to save it and load it, a friend told me that in order to load up your
scene, you have to load up your package first. I said:
“What, all of your packages?”
And he replied “No you should only have one package”
That’s when it hit me, I had created a package for each
bloody mesh and imported all the blitz textures and my building textures, renaming
them all the same thing, etc.
I felt so stupid and died a little inside. I
misunderstood the tutorial and made things much longer for myself. I could’ve
have finished it so much faster and wouldn’t be so stressed for time.
The
annoying thing was that I had to deal with the problems with merging everything
together (which wasn’t that hard) and having to figure out if I have any
duplicates of the same file under a slight change in the names.
Well in the end I got there and everything started to make a
little more sense. I’m relieved that UDK processed weren’t ACTUALLY that long
so it was in a way another relief to me.
Well, after I lined everything up and brought everything
into UDK and got the level playable, I went to check out how the collision
meshes were.
Everything from the bottom floor was great, there wasn’t any
problem with the collisions but the jump node wasn’t working. I had followed
the tutorial precisely but nothing would change. I had a suspicion that it only
worked if it was in the ‘game mode’ (with the guns and double jump mechanic).
After finding out from a friend on how to activate it, I was finally able to
confirm my suspicion and I was correct; it had started working after it was
enabled.
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| Whoops, I can walk through this! |
As I landed a top the fire escape, the first thing I noticed
was that I was able to see through the buildings as I didn’t put the collision
mesh close enough to the static mesh.
I continued to drop into my balcony and
found out that the planes I used as a collision mesh for the walls didn’t work
and I walked right through them.
A little disappointed with how it turned out with the
interior, I have run out of time to make any fixes so I can only take in all
the mistakes I made and be extra careful for future projects and practices. I
feel I may have been a little over ambitious with the idea of creating an
interior.
As I was walking around in the interior, I thought to myself that it would
have been nice to add some subtle lighting to the ceiling and made me think
about looking into lighting in UDK sometime soon.
Oh yeah, after all that trouble with the packages, I forgot to add one tiiiiiiny little asset on the road...
fml... ;_;
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| HURRR I SO DUMB (Seriously, this might not look that bad, but it took me suuuuch a long time *cries to sleep* |
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