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