I made some concrete pillars for my UDK scene.

They're pretty simple concrete pillars that I sculpted some damage into in Zbrush, and baked to normal maps/ambocc maps in Xnormal. I made some variations by adding pipes and wires, and further variations will be accomplished inside UDK using decals for dirt and markings. I also made a fire extinguisher, but forgot to make a stand for it to attach to the pillar. Ah well.

These screens are from marmoset.

I made rebar insides for the pillars that can be used as core meshes for the UDK fracture tool. This means that they stay inside the pillar holding its shape when it gets shot up.

The only problems I've had so far is getting the core mesh to show up before it takes any damage, as one of the pillar variations has some big damage modelling in already where the rebar shows through. The other problem is that the UDK rocket launcher seems to do some fairly weedy damage to the fractured meshes, so I'll need to find a way to boost that.


Anyhoo,

I also remade that TV. I made a new mesh and new textures, and also changed how it works in UDK.

Now, it has three different screen meshes. One for when the tv is on, one for off, and one that is all smashed up. The tv can be switched on and off by pressing use on the buttons. This makes a switching noise as well.

The "On " screen is a realtime capture of the scene from a camera somewhere behind the view.


There's also a proper cubemap for the reflections, as opposed to a plain image like all my previous reflective stuff.

I made a pistol for the udk scene. It's gonna be lying around along with the helmet and the ak I made ages ago. The idea is to imply that the soldiers that were here before all left in a hurry or got killed or something.

anyhoo...

It was the usual process, model a high poly model, then a low, and bake normal maps and an ambient occlusion map in Xnormal.

The bakes came out really well, I was really pleased with how clean they were.

The textures were made by baking out a mask texture from the high to the low, and using that as a selection for different base textures (e.g bakelite for the handle, metal for the slide/receiver). Then there was the usual normal map filters, and then I made a spec map using lots of brightness/contrast, hue/saturation changes, as well as painting in some edging and scratches, and adding some splotchy colour to the slide to give it a kind of oily sheen.

All these pictures (except from the high poly one) were rendered in marmoset.

TV

So I made a TV.

The screen flickers, and has static panning over it all the time. You can get a better look at the material by clicking the screenshot.
It also uses static mesh emissive lighting on the screen, giving it a nice glow.
I like the emissive lighting in UDK, it looks a lot better than the other lighting. Unfortunately it's not dynamic, and has to be baked, so it doesn't always have many uses.

With emissive lighting, you can't use a mesh larger than 5000 triangles, which isn't a problem with the tv, but when you do go over the limit you don't get a warning or an error message, so it can be hard to figure out what went wrong.

This is the first material I've made that makes use of a sine or a time node. I used those to get the flickering. The sine goes from 0-1,  which was too harsh, so I multiplied it a bit to get a softer change.

If I was to make the tv again, I'd throw a lot more polys at it. At the minute it's 33 triangles, but with normal, specular maps etc.
I'd also make it one material. At the minute it is split between a fairly simple material for the casing etc., but the transition is noticeable (sometimes) so I'd probably just do it with masks and so on next time.

Bullet

So I made this bullet a while ago as part of the Mare's Leg model I made for Fistful of Frags.
Anyway, as you can see from the mares leg video, the textures for the old one were crap. So I experimented with texturing the bullet to figure out the best way to redo the gun.

I'm pleased with how it turned out. The turnaround video above, and the breakdown screenshots are from the blender realtime opengl viewport, but it's all easily adapted into UDK or other engines.

Inside UDK

I'll probably mess around with the UDK material a bit more to get it looking a little closer to the turnaround video.