Senior Thesis Week 16: Fall semester Finals

With the export issue solved i was able to import the rest of the level and start playing with the shaders. I managed to get the edge detection to work as planed though their are a few undesired glitches that will need resolution over winter break. If you look to the images bellow using the edge detection you can see there is a black space on the ground. This is due to how the shader is detecting the edges. There is also a lighting glitch you can see in the last image that will likely require the re-creation of a new dominant directional light.

Senior Thesis Week 15: Last Week of classes (Export issue solved!)

 

After importing & exporting in many different ways, settings, plugins, and applications, I stumbled upon a solution. At first I was updating the FBX file by adding buildings one at a time to see what objects caused the issues. at a certain point every addition would cause geometrical issues. But when importing separate FBX groups things would be fine. I was already aware that the UDK FBX plugin had a vertex limit of 65535, however what I didn’t know was imports start to become inconsistent when you pass the halfway mark on the vertex count. This had not been an issue in past levels or assets I had done as they were much more simplistic and smaller scale. So the simple solution was to export/import the pieces of the level into smaller groups. I haven’t finished importing everything yet, but so far everything has been going smoothly.

 

Remember kids, if your exports polly count is exceeding 32768, prepare for unexpected consequences.

As for the modular character pieces…   More textures!More to come…

 

Senior Thesis Week 14: UDK export tests & crowd systems

As the semester runs down to the last couple weeks, the time has come to run some tests in UDK to see what areas need further patch work and what areas are good to go.Normally freezing transformations & deleting history is enough. Unfortunately this stage isn’t going quite as expected. As you can see by the image below, some of the first few exports were a little… off…

Changing the FBX exporter back to the older revision and triangulating before export helped quite a bit but the geometry still has a few issues.

Some sections export with no issue, which is rather odd considering each section is constructed from the same parts. I likely just have to figure out whats different between the sections in order to solve the export issue. I remember having a similar issue way back when tacking a UDk class and typed up a short doc file with a simple fix in case i ever encountered it again. that file is unfortunately who knows where on my 1TB backup drive 😛 But once i get everything squared away with the exporting, i can start working on the edge detection shadder!

On another note… UDK Crowd system!

For an advanced studio class I’ve been working on a modular character system to implement into my level for later use. An underpopulated town level makes no sense unless its a post apolitical scenario. Since this town is very much alive, it needs other people in it to help make it feel alive.

 

I still have quite a bit of texturing to go through as there will be different skin, clothing, & hair variants. I’ve played with the UDK crowd system enough to know that i can have multiple characters (pawns) running around and restrict them to specific areas & paths. I’ll only need one animation for these (walk forward) and then an idle animation for those who will be placed in specific areas. Another nice thing about the Crowd system is it has collision available, so the pawns in the crowds will not only avoid collision with each other, but will avoid collision with the player. Now i don’t have to worry about a flock of phantoms walking through each other.

The crowd pawns are fairly low poly so i should have to problem implementing them in large numbers where ever necessary without worrying to much about system resources. I can have the Crowd pawns load & unload with the sections of the level as well to better optimize the level.