Here’s a clip  of most of the things I’ve done for Studio 2 the last 10 weeks. Most of these have been integrated into realtime scenes for two separate team projects. Hopefully I can get some footage form them soon.

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Two weeks ago, I spent 6 days straight completing an art test as part of an internship application. It was a lot of fun. Below are the results and some of the breakdown. Note: the model isn’t mine. I did UVs, Materials, Textures, and Lighting. The assignment was to clean up the scene and render photo-real day and night lighting.

The scene was originally in complete disorder,  almost no named nodes, no hierarchy, no groups, almost no UVs. I named all of the objects, organized them, creating lighting, UV layout, and added notes (such as the one visible). I’m pretty happy with my submission, especially the Moon shading network.

The Moon took a lot of troubleshooting (in part thanks to Maya’s occasionally buggy node network connecting/disconnecting), but I got exactly what I wanted in the end: I turned a mediocre image into a flexible shading network.  The hard part was essentially un-pre-multiplying the black from the image, using only the original image and an outline mask. The Moon is a card / image plane that is rigged to move to any position in the sky, the same network was used in both shots, with only one small adjustment made.

Oh yeah, and here’s some of the textures, at 1/8th resolution (after clicking full view). I also had bump and spec maps. I ran out of time before I got to displacements, I’d like to go back and do them…

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Before moving on, I decided to go back and make some improvements on the fire I created in UDK Cascade.  The effect looked fine from a medium-far distance, but failed up close. Problems may not be evident, but here’s a list:

• Heat Distortion was too strong
• Heat Distortion material had bad material mask. (Made corners and edged appear)
• Flame had unknown scale.
• Flame Material looked “glittery” and too uniform in intensity

Because the scale was previously undetermined, I created 3 size variants with the new flame particle system.

To break up the uniform animation, I reorganized the material tree and tiled the mask 2×2 so that SubUVs could be used. That way, there is variation in the flame particles. Here is the new fire material preview:

Here is the shading network of the new fire material:

That’s it. Next effect will be a magic barrier for a demon…

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