Mudbox time again

Ok ive been using mudbox a few weeks in college , with some sucess , but to get really good results I have to really push up the resolution in mudbox, and the normals isnt as good as using nvidia in Photoshop but hey ho heres my floor so far, I was trying to break it up a bit
So im liking how the floor look now, I think im going to redo the well in mudbox see if I can really make it look like slime dripping off the sides .

Then im going to start on the walls

its Mudbox time !

Here's the concept that Dean has kindly provided to us

So here's my block out in Max so far, ive put a mesh smooth on most of the assets, just to see if the control points are going to work , so I can then export into Mudbox..... just a bit gutted im going to miss out on Deans tutorials on how to get the normals and stuff while im in Thailand


so I hope these are looking the part , not really happy with the chest yet and ive got to do the monster and other bits , but most of the assets are working in mudbox, just gotta start un wrapping when i get back.

Lets Have Some Atmosphere !!!

n so here ive combined two textures the first is the main door texture which is the main texture on the mesh, and the 2nd is the blood texture which i made in photoshop and combined the two using a multiple node in UDK and then simply used the Panner node to move the blood texture down the door, i also combined the normal texture for both and used a panner on the blood to try and make the blood look proud of the door.

ok now ive got my blood texture the next step was to see if i could animate a emissive light shining through a window.I have used a alpha texture to give me an opacity on the window glass and then i used a Rotator node in UDK combined with a simple cloud texture that i found in UDK
and heres a breakdown in UDK of how i built this ,note the Rotator node has its own values of X and Y and initial speed , which you can play about with to get varying results






Ok im finally getting somewhere with the effects I was wanting to get for my haunted theme the next step was to animate a materail and get a light to flash in sequence so that when the player enters the corridor it triggers both the light and the materail and also try and add sound to the mix which after a LOT of hair pulling I eventually got :


so how did i get this, here's a breakdown which is quite complicated so here goes:


The first thing you notice in the engine is two different icons:

1. Mi- short for Material Instance Actor,the first thing i did was assign this to my map through the main actor browser,once assigned I then copied the original material as a Material Instance and copied it to the mesh








this is the main texture that is on my mesh , i had to make sure I added a Vector Parameter and give it a value and then name it before copying it as a Material Instance this is what will be animated in the Matinee
a breakdowwn of the sequence used in Kismet to animate the material and the lights, the first thing to do is assign a VectorMaterialParameter


this control;s the brightness of the material by inputting a value of
0= off
1= full brightness

and any altenate values between 0 and 1 will give varing amounts of emissive brightness on the materail.

Then its just a matter of moving the time line everytime a new value is entered.

The next part is to animate the light themselves , this is acheived by firstly adding a Pointlighttogglable to my map



once this is assigned it into Matinee:
the brightness is controlled with a group called
NewFloat Property Track and a value given for the brightness from 0 -1 just like I did for the materials earlier , and again using alternate values I can control the brightness of the light:

LIght Flicker Material

today was a good day in college I finally got the look I was after , at the moment its on my windows texture , but now I know how to go about getting it to look genuine it shouldn't be much of a problem to use the material to make a light flicker the trick is now to make a delay so that when I apply the texture to the lamp mesh I have a different flashing sequence

Blood and LIght flicker

ok ive started experimenting with the materials in UDK , trying to get the effect of blood running down the doors, ive sort of got what I was after , but it very flat on the doors at the moment, not really sussed how to make the normals stand out when the diffuse texture is Panning, need to try and make the blood more prominante must be a way of doing it , ive also had a go and flickering lights using the Light Point Toggable function i UDK , ther is a tutorial on how to make your materials flicker but their all on my old H-Drive , hopfully Andy can work his magic for Monday but heres the result so far
oh and this next vid is the Kismet/Matinee in UDk

working its magic, I just love effects :)now all I have to sort is the sound effects , but that can wait , tomoz I might have a bash at doing some anims for the elevator switch both on the outside of the lift and the inside

I want to be able to animate the pointer probably as a mover and the buttons to light up just like a real set of buttons probably with emissives or an animated texture

Trigger test1 Multiple doors

so this is my first Trigger test to see if I can move multiple doors from one trigger , its works quite well , just need to sort some sound out for the doors themselves.
If I can suss out how to do this , then all I have to do is make one good looking corridor and move the doors which ever way I want. the next step in this is to animate a blood texture to start seaping down the doors or the walls , should look quite effective if I can pull it off.

Project : Hell Hotel

And so it begins the start of the 3rd year , and my idea is to remake my own Twilight Zone horror fest in the shape of an hotel thats set in the 1930-40's .
After watching the like of the Twilight Zone and classics like Hammer House Of horror in the 1980's I wanted to see if I could create a spooky looking atmospheric game level using the UDk engine , mainly so I can use the Kismet to produce the triggers I will need for things like:

Slamming /opening of doors
Flickering lights
decals blood/guts on walls etc
movement of objects like paintings and other objects

Ive always been a fan of this type of horror , where its not what you can see but the suggestion of what might be, and Stephen Kings books like the IT and the Shining are two great examples of this .... as well as classics like Pyscho and the House on Haunted Hill




So this is the look im going for , mainly because of the reference ive gathered and because I was lucky enough to go to Florida in 2006 and 2008 and the ride The Tower Of Terror was the one ride that really ' struck a chord' .

The attention to detail was the one thing I admired that the Disney Imagineers had produced and I want to try and create all this detail in full 3d and have a working level to run around and explore or a camera animated to a set route showing off all my skills as a modeler/texture artist, as I feel this is my strongest skills .

So so far ive come up with the idea and ive started my collection of references, mainly from http://www.towerofterror.org/secrets

which was a gem of a find as it has given me loads of references from the ride and will help me to break down what im going to use in terms of rooms and assets for the rooms .

Also I will have to have corridors linking the rooms together so the player will be fooled into thinking that the hotel is bigger than it really is and it will save me a lot of work by having one main look to the corridors then all I will need to do is place movers in Unreal in different places and the player will think hes in a different corridor in the hotel.