I Cannot Grasp the True Form of This Final Earthbound Post!

Yup. It's done.

Whew, it feels so excellent to have this finally done. It took about a year to accomplish, though it was on and off at times. But towards the end, I really hit my stride and got it in the can. The last week of production was basically setting up all of the camera work and events in kismet, and doing all sorts of tweaks. It was maddening. I would build my lighting with production quality (which takes about an hour and a half to do) and then as I scrubbed through the render of the camera fly-through, I would notice small things wrong here and there. And as my fellow Unreal users know, you have to completely rebuild your lighting whenever you move anything around. This happened 3 or 4 times. Setting up Kismet was a new experience for me. This is basically what you have to do when you want cool things to happen. In this case, it's for making the snow wind blow, moving the skyrunner, and making material effects fade in and out. The icicles were giving me some really bad flickering, so animating their shininess to fade in only at a close proximity was necessary. I did the same thing with the snow wind. I had a panning translucent wind texture fade in and out on top of triggering some wind-blowing particle effects. Overall, it's a nice effect and adds some life to the scene. Hell, I can say that for the whole scene. Compared with my old projects it feels more alive with moving effects like steam, fire, and wind, and rain. Also, I had to do some LOD work with the icicles. They were really thin, and the aliasing I was getting at a distance was really distracting. So to remedy this, I made a new model fade in as you get further away. It's one that has thicker individual pieces. Anyway, once that was done, I put the footage into Adobe Premiere and had to remind myself how to edit videos. o_0  Once I rendered out a spiffy new Quicktime, I took high resolution screenshots of my best angles. Then, I took them into Photoshop and touched them up a bit. Fortunately for me, I was really picky with the initial quality of the level, so cleanup was minimal. I also took the time do take my models into Marmoset and make some nifty wireframe shots. God bless that program. I used to have to take UV snapshots of the wireframe texture on each individual model and then render them out in UDK's static mesh viewer. And even after that, I would have to touch up the wireframe lines in Photoshop. Now with Marmoset, I can just load in the models with no texture needed, and do a high res screenshot. No cleanup needed. Amazing. And then I decided that I would show off some of the actual textures I did, namely the tiling rock, skydome, and tree textures. I had to do a bit of touch up for presentation purposes, but nothing too bad. So yeah, that's about it. Oh, and for anyone coming here from EBCentral or Starmen.net, welcome! I realize that you may be late to the party in terms of the "behind the scenes" aspect of this project. If you're interested in seeing how it came about, here's a link to the first entry:
http://www.3dryan.blogspot.com/search?updated-max=2013-04-24T19:57:00-07:00&max-results=7

ALL DONE. Now for two weeks I become extremely lazy, because I've clearly earned it. Then, I'll get back into something new. I actually already have an idea of what that is, but I have to do some research first.

"That's my real job you know...I'm a billboard guy."

Reeeeeal quick update. It's getting so close...... :)

I'm thinking this whole thing will be done by next weekend. I'm not going to bother posting any progress pics, because I want there to be more of a surprise when it hits. Basically, I just finished the effects work for it, and did another lighting pass. There's steam, and smoke, and flame, and rain, and snow, and all sorts of cool stuff for the children. 

The main changes for the lighting pass were with overall color scheme. For both the day and nighttime scenes, they were looking a little boring. Just plain ol" white lights with just a tad of orange thrown in. So I exaggerated warm and cool colors when I needed to get a more specific emotion or reaction from the viewer. And lastly, I toned down how dark the non-lit areas are in the night scene. So just an extra day to get the lighting to a better level. I mainly played Ocarina of Time while I waited for my lighting bakes, so it was actually quite relaxing. :D 

And now, I get all of the functionality for the camera fly-through working. Animating cameras, spawning/killing particles, moving objects, all kinds of fun.

The final to do list!

1) Scene setup for camera fly through, and capturing video.

2)Editing video and taking screen grabs.

3) Getting it all up on my website. (forgot to mention this before, but it goes without saying. Oh girlfriend web designer, don't fail me now!)

"Aiiiiieeeeeeeeee! I screamed 'cause I didn't know what to do."

Pumpin' out updates like a fool!

The night time lighting for the scene is done. Was tricky in some spots, but I'm happy with the quality. This is the first time I've done a lighting setup that isn't just one directional light representing the sun in an outdoor scene. Which is strange when I think about it. But alas, Here she be.

It seems that getting night time exterior lighting in UDK is a bit tricky unless you know how to tweak the right settings in the world properties. Just making your dominant directional light (the sun) be extremely dim isn't enough. But once I had it down and tweaked the distance fog settings to be just right, the initial setup was good. Then it was a matter of adding in the spotlights and point lights, tweaking material settings, and adding in some subtle glow cards around the lights themselves. There were some times where I would actually need to use two light actors to get just the right look for a given light. An example would be the spotlights on the side of the dorm building. Obviously, the spotlights are shining light onto the snow below. But I couldn't get them to light up the actual sides of the buildings. So I had to add in an additional light for each that would be tilted at a steeper angle to radiate light onto the bricks. Lighting in UDK isn't 100% perfect yet, so this is what lighting artists have to do sometimes. Of course, I added in a new skydome and the actual models for the lights. I was teetering back and forth about how subtle the skydome should be. It has a borealis northern lights feel to it, which feels right for an arctic scene. I was concerned that it might be too distracting, but decided that it added a nice touch. So I kept it in. Maybe one of you thinks it's too distracting? Let me know if you do. I'd be interested to hear.

Anyway, short but sweet post. As it stands now:

1) Effects

2) Camera and kismet setup

3) Scene recording, screenshot taking  

4) Post production: editing video, screen grabs

Stay safe.