Final Presentation

Final Showreel

Creating foliage grass

For grass I'm going to use some reference that was available in udk package

Grass texture on the ground mesh is to flat using planes gives the better impression of grass in a 3d space, by duplixatng and roaring planes with a two sided texture its easy to create a clump of grass strands.

Creating the alpha was rather simple I created my own way in Photoshop by using the lasso tool drawing a shape of a leaf and then filling it in, for the stem I painted it in and using burn to create shadows.

From here you can export the planes as a clump as a single object and then place duplicate and rotate across the landscape surface.

Adding Fog.

Fog or Height fog is a feature in UDK which is very easy to implement in UDK. It's available in the content browsers.

The fog helps position the environment make it appear higher up and a greater distance from sea level.

Creating my own Skybox

This post will be about how i went about creating my own skybox one of the most key asset in my scene as would it be for most outdoor themed environments.

So i couldn't find any useful resoruces online to help me create my own skybox, so instead i turned to look at the ones already avaiable in UDK in order to create my own.

From what i learned there were multiple UVs on a skybox, from this and the material editor i learned these UVs where for panning clouds.

At first i had a little trouble with the UVs positioning.

Here is my own version of the sphere that matches up with UDK's material.

Scaled it up in my scene and placed it accordingly, now i need to create my own material.

Creating the Character

Using the move tool i can change the shape of the body pulling it to my guidelines on the plane behind, in this particular image the shoulders and the back of the neck needs to be pulled upwards.

Side by side you can see the Zsphere blockout i started out with. And on the right you can see i have change the proportions further.

Using the Highpoly from Zbrush as my mesh to start painting polygons using Quad Draw. 

Setting up Quad Draw, which became available in the most recent version of Maya 2014.

Once i have finished the half of the geometry i duplicate it over in the +X direction.

Blending textures with Mesh Paint

Here i have painted onto the surface of my floor a grass texture to blend in with my grass geometry. 

My floor consists of 800 triangles, this is enough for me to get a good number of vertices for me to paint onto. The geometry will hold this information, so i can always change the textures later on.

Here you can see more clearly i have painted green to apply the grass texture, and the orange is an alternating texturing that surrounds it, the grass planes are the rectangular shapes that cut into the floors surface. 

Lastly this is the mesh paint material which is fairly simple and consists of connecting multiple textures to lerps and then assigning each texture with a vertex colour in which you select to paint.