Back at it

Been slacking on the portfolio building, but 3-Day weekends are great to remedy that! Six months of not touching UDK because I've been working and I've really lost all my skills. So I decided to redo all my ImbueFX intro Cascade tutorials to remind me of what I've forgotten. Also simple effects will be a good basis for more elaborate things.

I also got Xsplit Broadcaster to work with Fraps so I don't have half speed gifs anymore.

First off this is the in-prog of something I want to do that'll be like a rain of Melf's Acid Arrows. Obviously the arrow is placeholder, but the idea is there.

Ammo pickup. Not finished. Want to add some sparkles and a displacement sphere grid around it to make it a bit more sci-fi.

Rocketfire and a ball of lightning. Both of these are using Bill Kladis' textures just to learn the principles.

Electricity AoE

Simple Electricity Area of Effect. CamStudio recorded it at about 1/2 speed for some reason. Once I have all my spell effects done I'll do a high quality FRAPs capture.

Celestial Effect

Starting making various spell effects. This one is a sort of celestial star effect.

Kind of bad quality and slowdown on the gif. I'm  going to hold off making videos of them all individually and upload them together to one Spell Effect video.

AoE Effect

Finished ground pound effect.

The animation and character is from the ImbueFX tutorial, but all the effects and the textures for the effects were made by me.

AoE Spell In Progress

In progress shot of a ground pound spell. All the mesh particles are in, just need to finish up making the ground look cracked.

Hayloft

Finally finished that hayloft and added a bunch of environment effects. Also my first time using Matinee.

Cascade Tutorial

Following along with Bill Kladis' Cascade tutorial. Onto the second part now. Made a health pickup with some smoke.

UDK Lasers

Simple laser effect in UDK.

Orb Aura

Following along with another tutorial to make a Skyrim sort of effect. Nearly done, just need to finish the center part.

Embers

Decided the fire on the barrel looked a little out of place so I changed the texture of the top piece to be charred and added an emissive ember texture that pulses back and forth with a sine wave in order to make it look like it's actually burning.

Burning Barrel

Pretty sure the 'Hello World' of the VFX industry is setting things on fire. So made some fire in UDK's Cascade engine, which as expected was infinitely more robust and customizable than Unity's Shuriken. Though I'm glad I learned on Shuriken first.

Fire sprite sheet was generated by Positech Games' neato Explosion Generator.

Hayloft

All lit and brought into UDK.

Hayloft Props

Some props for my hayloft scene. The crates change color based on location.

Lake Shader

Short clip of the lake shader I made last semester.

Hayloft

Quick test (without lightmaps) of my hayloft. Just wanted to see how the cracks in the wood looked.

Final Project

For the final we had a week to make and texture a scene using all the things we've learned this semester.

I decided to change up the water/rocks scene and add some grass to it along with modeling some props to make it interesting. Here's some in progress shots.

Blend Shaders

Made a bunch of blend shaders this week. Started with lava but got pretty frustrated trying to get the lava to look like Lava, I think it's a lot more advanced than I thought it was. Moved onto water and snow which were infinitely easier and look a lot better.

Normal and Diffuse for the water shader.

The snow shader, attempting to blend using a height map. Kind of successful but needs more work. Was going off this tutorial, which inverted everything, but that seemed unnecessary so I changed it.

Height/Slope Blending

I wanted to do something a bit different than the standard mountains with snow on them for height blending. So I made this volcanic environment.

I took a height map from Google Earth of a canyon in Egypt and another of a volcano and blended the two together. Then I made textures for obsidian, a red glowing obsidian type rock and ash for the top.

Here's the material editor for this. It looks like a lot but really it's the same thing repeated for the spec, normal and emissive channels.

And a close up.

Here's the material for the lava surrounding the volcano.

Chipped Rock Floor

Made this chipped rock floor in 3ds Max while following along with another Digital Tutor lesson. Very first time using Max and it seems pretty handy for blocking things out like this.

In progress blocking in Max:

 

Took my tiled block pattern into Z-brush and sculpted about half the blocks, then back into Max and duplicated the sculpted ones along the blocked out guidelines I made.

 I generated all the maps in Max with Render to Texture, then made an additional grungy normal map in Knald based off a photo I took of fishsticks I made that burnt to a baking sheet:

 
Finally I brought the whole thing into UDK and combined the two normal maps for finer detail.

And the final result:

Rocks

Video games have generally between 3 and 72,348 rocks in them. So here's some rocks.

The rock mesh was generated using a nifty Rock Generator plugin for Maya found here. And then I tweaked them a bit.

Diffuse map created by layering a bunch of photos and some painting, normal map made in Knald.