3D - SciFi Traffic light asset - Concept by Shaun Slade

I am re-create an asset from a piece of concept art by Shaun Slade. The asset is a SciFi traffic light that I find very interesting and am excited to create.Still a wip I intend to update the progress through this blog. To see more work by Shaun Slade visit: http://www.shaunslade.com/.

BA8 - Final post productions

So after a long 7/8 months of the my final project for university it has come to an end and so hand in is close.  The entire scene has been a pleasure to make and I have enjoyed every part of it (you can check out my work on my website; http://www.jackeastoe.co.uk). I also had the chance to be part of amazing development team for Dare to be Digital. Entering Dare was a great experience  and was a taste of what the industry is like.

And lastly the Day to Night Time cycle render in UDK

BA8 - Business card update

So after coming into uni and showing a few friends it was brought to my attention that I shouldn't necessarily include my mobile number on the card, mainly so that I don't get any random people just calling me up. The other design part of my business card that has now changed is the font on the back. I have changed it and made it all caps. This design changed has made it look a lot more uniform and neater.

BA8 - Facebook page and more...

So I thought I would jump on the band wagon and create a Facebook page catered to my 3D work. It's actually a nice addition to my blog and site since I can post WIP and share my creations with fellow friends. I have also been designing my postcards, business cards and a logo. All requirements for my course and a generally good thing to have for my portfolio. Overall creating the logo I wanted to have something simple and clean, most logos are very simple and that's what usually works.

https://www.facebook.com/JackEastoe3D

BA8 - UDK Day/Night Cycle

For my scene I especially wanted to have a day and night cycle, however this is easier said than done. After searching around on google and UDK's website for a while I found a tutorial on how to create a day and night cycle that uses kismet and matinee. Although following the process was fairly simple the end result wasn't quite dynamic enough for what I wanted. for starters the day/night cycle doesn't include dynamic clouds and thus doesn't quite fit my scene. I was good fun though to test it out and play with new tools within UDK.

Tutorial: https://forums.epicgames.com/threads/744541-Day-and-Night-Cycle

BA8 - Update on scene in Maya

So a while has past now and I have been very busy with all kinds of work including my scene within Maya. I am now at a stage where I feel comfortable to say that it is 99% complete (the 1% being minor tweaks and maybe some smaller assets). Anyway below are a few renders including what will most likely be a render page for my development document. More is still to be done including finishing the scene in UDK (the scene is now in UDK and updates will follow with screenshots and hopefully a couple of videos to support my scene). Overall I am very happy with how the scene has turned out despite having other projects on the go at the same time :). Of course some of these renders aren't final.

BA8 - Final production tweaks

Church Baking

Since my church in the scene is far away and I wanted to export it to UDK it meant that it would take a long time with each individual pieces having to be placed in the right area and then the materials applied and corrected. To save myself time I simply made a duplicate of the church (combined) and deleted any unnecessary faces that the viewer wouldn’t see. Then I did a bake using the original church model with a 2048 texture map to create a low poly version of the church with the UV’s all on one map. I had some troubles with the windows so I extracted the original windows from the high poly model and exported them out as separate FBX files for UDK. Overall in doing so it saved me a lot of time and hassle as well producing the same result.

Cloth Simulation

Since I have added a cloth sheet to my seen within the Maya setup as well as the UDK set up I wanted to be able to make the cloth move with a wind effect being applied to it in UDK. The easiest way to do this was setting up a plane to act a moving cloth. I added 5 skeleton joints to the mesh after I had sub divided it to make more a fluid transition in UDK. I then used the Smooth Bind tool to combine the joints to the plane. In order to make sure that the cloth would move only from the second vertex line down I used the Paints Skin Weight Tool to paint the vertices that I would require to move and have the weight. After this I selected both the mesh plane and joints and exported them as an FBX file. Once imported into UDK it was a case of making sure that it imported as skeletal mesh and having the right boxes ticked such as Force CPUSkinning. Ticking this option made it so cloth simulation was turned on. The only next few steps were to add the simulation to each joint not including the first since I wanted the top joint to be still so the cloth would move. The last step was to add a wind actor, to do this I went to:

• ·         Properties (F4)
• ·         SkeletalMeshActor
• ·         Skeletal Mesh Component
• ·         Cloth Wind

Once ticked on I simply set the X, Y and Z coordinates for the wind to work.

Physics Testing

Prior to testing the cloth simulation I came across a tutorial on physics asset creation. This meant I experimenting with a tutor the physics working with the plane in UDK, as the cloth dropped to the ground it would act with the surroundings and folding in on itself. Although not a major addition to my scene it was good to learn something simple like for this future.

Tutorial: http://www.chrisalbeluhn.com/UDK_Physics_Asset_Creation_1.html