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.