scene demo 720p, ~214mb, loop
scene demo 480p, ~173mb, loop
character turnaround 720p, ~18mb, loop
character turnaround 480p, ~9mb, loop
mount turnaround 720p, ~54mb, loop
mount turnaround 480p, ~29mb, loop
presentation
post mortem
The movies are all rendered with the H.264 codec and 10.000kbps data rate. Let me know (in time) if something is not working or you got suggestions for better codecs et.c.
Extra stuff:
showreel 720p, ~114mb
scene demo shorter version, LQ
character turnaround ~6mb loop, only finished look
mount turnaround ~17mb loop, only finished look
Thanks to those that took the time and give helpful crits and comments. Really appreciate it!
It’s been fun, cya around.
Rocks!
Just thought I should take some time and show my different rock materials I mentioned the other week. As it stands now I’m leaning towards the second material, especially the one with the detail map on it. I’ve tweaked the texture on the rocks as well, darker and less and more evenly placed specular. This week I’m going to do final tweaks to the character, dino and scene. Week 19, which also seems to be the last week, is for the ‘post-production’ where I put together the frapsed material and write the post mortem doc.
Rock material 1 with sparkles
Rock material 2
Rock material 2 with detail map
Rock material 3 with another setup for the normal map, giving more depth (ugly)
As you can see I’ve also tweaked the lights, and enlarged the character, dino and gong.
Scene progress #2
I’ve continued to texture and light the scene this week, mainly the rocks and the platform has been textured. I decided to experiment some more with the material editor and tried different approaches for the rocks. I made three different versions, first was with regular textures only (diffuse, specular, normal etc.) while the other two involved more advanced setups. I tried to achieve that sparkling look certain rocks can have and with the help of udn.epicgames.com I managed to do that, but it didn’t really fit here, since most of the rocks in my scene are melting to glass. The third approach was just to strengthen the normal map but it didn’t look very good.
Even though I didn’t have any use for these different material setups, it gave me a better understanding of the material editor.
I’ve placed the triceratops and character in the scene and placed lots of lights (ambient light from the lava and blue lights from the sky) and I think it looks pretty nice so far. Now I’m going to tweak textures here and there on various objects (the rocks especially). Later on I’m going to have a look into skyboxes, or I’ll just make a dark coloured box, anything other than black. The light will be baked inside the editor, and I’ll have one or two dynamic lights as well. After the lighting is done, I’ll start looking into capturing the whole thing with Fraps.
I might add that I’ve had some problems with the unreal 3 editor in school, computer locking up several times. Don’t know if it’s too demanding for the graphics card or something…
Scene progress
I’ve begun placing the objects in my ut3 scene, mainly with rocks I made last week. Textures to come. For the platform base and rocks I tried applying a height map for parallax mapping, it worked great and makes the details pop out a bit more (even if it might not show much here). I still find it a bit irritating to navigate in the viewport, it really slows me down.
I’ll also have to re-texture the triceratops skull to fit in this scene. A skybox or something else than a black background will probably be needed to present it better.
Also, Dimitris gave me this link regarding turntables in ut3 editor, I will try it out since it might save me some time later on.
Next: Texturing, lighting…
Environment, Foliage and Cubemaps
These last few days I’ve begun working with the platform for the character and dino. I’ve blocked in some components and will continue to do this during the week. The rocks are around 1000 tris per rock, which might be a bit too generous, but the shapes look nice. Some of the rocks are a bit too large to simply texture them as I have with everything else, I will probably have to tile the textures on those. Going to try out detail maps for this.
I made some simple plants as well to put in the environment, some dry grass. I might try give them some glowy bits, from the intense heat of the various spots of magma I intend to have. Because glow = awesome.
Last but not least I wanted to test make my own cubemap, static reflections. The tutorials over at udn.epicgames.com and Hourences community site helped a lot with this. It was pretty easy and enhances the look from just having a regular specular map (in my opinion). I used an alpha map to decide what part will be reflective, I’m thinking it might work with a specular map here as well, where the white spots gets reflective and the darker stays non-reflective. I’ll have to try it out.