Week 10 - Advanced Rendering Techniques

This Week:

I worked on creating some trees for my level. Initially I wasn't too sure what type of trees are in the film as they seem to be drawn fairly roughly with very little detailing on the leaves, so I just had to go off the general shape of the trees, which led me to believe they were some kind of pine or fur tree. As UDK comes bundled with a version of speed tree I assumed that this would be the quickest and most efficient way of of creating good looking trees for use in UDK, unfortunately I was mistaken. After working out the ins and outs of how to use speed tree and modeling some nice looking pine trees I brought them into UDK and found that they brought the frame rate crashing down. After many hours of trying to work out why the speed trees were killing my frame rate I discovered that the average speed tree has a ridiculously high poly count of around 50,000. So after discussing the matter with my module leader we came to the conclusion that I could spend many more hours trying to get the speed trees to work properly and that those hours would be better spent simply creating my own trees that would allow me to have much more control over the look and feel of them as well as the poly count and texture size; so thats what I did, I've been modeling pine trees using quite simple topology for the trunk and branches, then using intersecting planes to create the pine needles on the branches.

As well as working on the trees I created a wind turbine, that I then set up a simple skeleton on and exported an animation of the blades rotating which then set up to play in the unreal matinee as soon as the level has loaded, this was a surprisingly simple process and I found the pipeline for exporting animations using the actor x plugin to be extremely efficient and easy to use.

Next Week:

I intend to tackle the issue of the background terrain/area and creating my own sky dome.