Role: Unreal TA
| Client: Universal Studios Florida
What started over a year ago as offsite development has turned into onsite integration at Universal Studios Orlando. While onsite I worked out of Universal's offices. It was a nice change of pace to be working with a client in their Studio. There's...
Role: Unreal TA
| Client: Super Cell
Recently our studio Squeeze was tasked with creating some user acquisition ads for Super Cell's Clash of Clans. I was responsible for the technical art systems in Unreal. This included...
I've completed a cycad as well as a test for ground cover. I'm aware that there was no grass in the Jurassic period, these grasses are just place holders for ferns cards. The real test was to see if dynamic raytraced lighting shadows the individual...
Work has been interesting lately as you may or may not know Mortal Kombat X has been canceled on last gen and I had been working on that for the last 7 months, so that was a bit of a blow. I'm on to a new project though and a publisher I've never...
I took a look at the realistic rendering demo that Epic Games posted. It has fairly nice soft shadowing and pays close attention to how your eyes behave in light. I think the gap between pre-rendered and real time visuals is staring to get close...
As a lot of you may know Epic Games announced that they are working on a new Unreal Tournament title. They've been doing weekly updates through twitch to keep the development community involved. You can check them out here:...
Another day and another piece done 🙂 I had a great time putting together this snowy turn table and trying out all sorts of different methods in ZBrush for creating snowy surfaces. For some extra fun I even threw in some "Matinee" animations using...
Here is an update on my snowy turn table I've been putting togeather. I've added some animated lighting and given most of the meshes another iteration of detailing and fixes. The next thing I have to do is finish the snowy bushes and make the ice...
Hi guys and girls I just thought I would post a quick update on a collection of assets I'm creating for an upcoming iOS title. It's a snowy scene and there are more meshes to come. I haven't worked on cube map reflections yet, but I will soon. All...
I've finished the UDK graveyard scene I was working on and started another 🙂 This scene was fun to work on and it gave me a better understanding of the Unreal Engine as a whole. The most interesting part of the entire process was learning the UDK...
Just before I left for Montreal I was able to snap some pics of my graveyard scene. I've got most of the modeling done, as well as the sky and rain systems. The Ivy on the foreground grave still needs to be skin weighted for wind movement, whereas...
Whaa, hugh? What the heck is it? Well grey packing refers to creating textures in photoshop that in and of themselves are not particularly useful, but each channel of colour, and possibly even an extra alpha channel contain useful grey-scale...
Making grass move in the UDK isn't overly complex but it does requite a decent handle on Maya and the Unreal Development Kit's material editor. The concept at it's core is to use the Material Property "world offset position" to make your grass...
I'm creating a cemetery scene so you can imagine that I'm going to need some tombstones. I have sculpted another since my last WIP and thought I would share it. As I was breaking down the scene I was trying to think of ways I could maximize my work...
I've been watching people model trees all at work over the past few days and it's driving me crazy. I must make a tree! So in keeping with my current project I'm going to sculpt an evergreen tree in the with snow on it for import into the Unreal...
Since my last update I've added a cloth skeletal mesh to the scene. Cloth inside the Unreal Development Kit is something I've always wanted to take a look at. After watching a quick tutorial over at 3D Buzz I was ready to start setting up my cloth...
Since my last update I've stopped working in ZBrush and started testing in the UDK. My goal for this update was to have the light maps working with a basic material in place. The first shot on the left shows the low poly tombstone with it's UV's...
Over the past few years I have really started to feel dependent on Maya as my 3D application of choice. It's an amazing piece of software, but when it comes to creating game assets ZBrush eventually came impossible to ignore. This is my first...
Posted these shortcuts a while ago at Eat3D. I though I would repost them here to share with anyone who doesn't frequent that site. If you aren't though you should. They have amazing video tutorials. Material Editor Shortcut Keys Num Key 1 1...
After digging into the 2DPlatformerStarterKit I began thinking about how I should go about creating my 2D test level. This level would be a staging ground for all sorts of pre-production tests. Things like lightning, particle systems, and mesh...
I was checking out the Unreal Developer Network last night and found out they've released what is essentially a template for a 2D platformer. My brain just about exploded when I saw this. I've been trying to code my own bare bones 2D platform...
Introduction You will have to recalculate the BSP every time you want to see the changes you have made. This lesson will cover the use of geometry mode to transform a brush's shape, or create an entirely new brush. There are several different ways...
Pretty self explanitory. This diagram labels all the components in the Unreal Development Kit user interface. This version isn't taken from the newest release of the UDK, but I will be updating this to the June beta release soon.
Introduction This lesson will cover the very basics of the interface while manipulating the “builder brush” with transform tools. For those of you who don't have it yet the UDK can be downloaded here from Epic Games. To enhance your transition into...
Here's a scale chart to help you visualize things when you're moving around in the Unreal Development Kit. Its set against assets from the Unreal Tournament III Game. The white numbers are Unreal grid dimensions. An average character is ~96...
In our past lesson we created 3 different sprites and a gradient mask. Then we put them all into one texture using channels. This lesson will use that texture as a base for a material network. This material network will let us create instances of our base material that will have variables we can change. We will be able to change the inside colour, outside colour, saturation, core brightness, and sprite textures themselves.
Hi, thanks for stopping in. This lesson will be a basic introduction to creating a material for use inside the Unreal Development Kit. If you’ve never created a material from scratch before than this is a good place to start. Our final texture will be an ice sheet with a nice smooth finish. The base for our material will be a photo we found off the internet.
Creating seamless textures is an important skill if you want to make your textures cover a large area and tile. Luckily for you the process is actually quite simple. From within Photoshop we’ll look at the Offset function and how to create custom brushes that are unique to the texture we’re working on. Well also be using the tried and true method of clone stamp to get rid of the seams the Offset filter creates.
