Digital Mercs

I’ve spent a fair bit of time over the past week or so brushing up my UDK skills. I’ve scoured the internet for answers to all sorts of problems. If anyone out there is looking for a good introduction to Unreal, and its capabilities I can’t recommend the videos from Eat3d.com enough. They are heavily production focused, teaching you good habits and workflow along with the regular instruction.

While building some materials for our game, I came across a problem that took me hours to find a solution for- The material blendmode BLEND_Modulate is not supported in the new versions of UDK for lit materials. Long story short, the answer it to use an unlit material. Here’s an example of this in action:

The walls and floor are just the same tiled metal texture. The grime on the walls is a 2-triangle plane with the above material on it sitting just on top of the walls. The mess on the floor is another material set up the same way using a different texture. It’s cool to note that this setup will accept global illumination and shadows properly.

Moving on, I’ve been scratching my head figuring out the best way to build a large warehouse for this level. And I mean Large. It takes up nearly a third of the racetrack. If the movie is to be believed, there’s something like three miles of track winding around inside it.

Originally, I’d blocked the main parts of the warehouse out in max, and was detailing high poly versions of the pieces to use like lego’s and build everything. Since the player is never really going to be looking at the building, and rather just racing around and through it, the High poly baked to Low poly approach was taking way too much time, and still resulting in a ton of assets.  Instead, I’ve gone ahead and blocked out the building using BSP’s. Using some tricks I picked up studying materials and shaders all weekend,  I know that I can make it look as good, if not better, with this approach.