After a few rounds of “How did I do this before?” and countless crashes from the Unreal Editor, we have two of our three custom cars drivable in game. They aren’t finished being modeled, nor are they textured but they’re setup and ready to go as actual vehicles. Once they’re completed it will be as simple as reimporting the skeletal mesh and driving away.
Since my last post I’ve been working on a number of different parts on the project. One of which is getting the track blocked out in UDK. We’re using Unreal’s fairly robust terrain editor to make up the track it self. The brownish/orange and grey checker is a blend of two materials that are going to make up dirt and asphalt. It’s all roughed-in but it’s a great start and we’re all excited to see this project taking shape.
This is the general shape of the track the Death Race will take place on. We cut it’s length down by a third from the movie because of time constraints, however it is setup that if time does permit we can add in the missing bottom loop. Outlined in red is the path taken (counter clockwise).
Outlined in green are possible short cuts that will be available if certain conditions are met (speed to hit a ramp, destroying enough debris, knowledge of its existence, etc..)
Or rather, Box.
Anyways, Boom! Progress is well underway with PDR. A few recent team meetings have really helped, as each team member shares their areas of expertise with the rest.
So, uhm, what am I looking at?
What indeed.
Apparently Terminal Island, home of Death Race, was once a lush forest of rebar and tarnished brass pipes. When they cleared the land to make room for their glorious prison/race track they went ahead and crushed the local vegetation into cubes. Afterwards, they used said cubes to line their track, and to provide shelter to unwitting Pit-crews in times of danger.
The nature of our project lends itself well to lots of tiling assets. The trick to making tiling assets believable, it to make them look like unique versions of the same thing. In the same way that no two manholes on a New York City street would collect exactly the same wear, We don’t want any two tiled assets in our game to look like exact copies.
To this end I’ve been building some simple tests in Unreal to get the most mileage out of our props.
To give you some background on the layout of this test scene, it’s just a bunch of simple BSP cubes. The floor and back wall have a neutral grey material with no specularity applied to them. You’ll see the color of the floor and back wall change though. This is because the level is lit with a single light with Lightmass (Global Illumination) set to 6 bounces. Since the only real color in the scene is red, everything else gets chroma-shifted in that direction.
First off, the scene with a 128×128 Brick texture applied to everything:
Next, the same material with a grunge mask, locked to the world position.
You can see that the grunge mask adds a bit of nice detail to the otherwise plain surface, but still it’s fairly obvious that it is just an overlaid texture.
Finally, the same material with a grunge mask locked to the world position, and a detail mask of a larger tiling scale locket to the world position. This detail mask is designed to add detail near the ground to make it look as if dirt and grime have collected there.
In the course of putting together this project, I made another personal discovery, Global illumination looks a little silly when the entire scene is dominated by one color (In this case, Red.) In actual application this shouldn’t be an issue.
Finally, here’s the material network I created for this demo. The only thing not shown in this picture are the scale values in the TexCoord nodes. I played with the values to make the grunge appear more subtle, and to make the detail layer fit the block height.
Jon and I have been working on a simple proof of concept for PDR. The idea is to create a simple track in UDK and add a vehicle.
For the Proof of Concept I am creating a few simple assets. These models will most likely not be used in the final project.
Asset Name: Steel Trellis
I created the Steel Trellis with the mindset of building assets that can be used in multiple configurations, and would be easily multiplied to create different structures.
Examples of multiple configurations.
Asset Name: Finish Line Lights
These lights will be used in unison with the Steel Trellis asset to create a starting/finish line for the Proof of Concept.
An example of how the assets can be used together.
After three days of tinkering we’ve figured out all the steps needed to get our own custom vehicles into the Unreal Engine. Above is a short video of our demo “box” car all rigged up and running around our test-bed map that I’ve dubbed “The Playground”.