Greetings, comrade.

This post is just a couple snippits of what I've been doing over the past day or two. I've decided that online documentation regarding lighting in the Unreal level editor is pretty much nonexistent, minus just telling you how to place a light and adjust the brightness of it. So, I decided to buy a book on it. "Mastering Unreal Technology Volume 1", is its name, and it looks promising for 32.99. So, while I'm waiting on that to get here, I decided to finally crank out that Russian propaganda poster mentioned earlier. And I must say, I'm happy with it:

What I basically did was make the poster as if it were brand new, and then roughed out the edges and added some dirt and paper overlays that gave it its worn out look. The original design:


(The writing is Russian for "nuclear power"). Creative, I know. Also, I added the transparency map to the window glass and placed an image behind it of the infamous abandoned ferris wheel found in Pripyat. (The city that had to be evacuated due to the Chernobyl disaster, where this scene is set).



This, along with the poster, hints at the setting without shoving it down the viewer's throat too much. I guess if you don't know by the title "Chernobyl" what it's about, then these won't matter. If you do however, it shows that I've done my homework. :D The tricky part of finding a good background image for the window was all in the perspective. It had to look as if you were seeing it by looking straight at the window, and also had to be something that gave you enough of a hint at the setting. If the angle of the image would be off even slightly, it would look weird as the camera pans right.

So, hopefully when I get my book, It'll help my lighting to not look like crap. Meanwhile, I'll be working on getting some random clutter on the ground, and finishing the color mapping. I'll have this whole thing done sometime in October. That's all I know for now.