Week 11 - Advanced Rendering Techniques

This Week:

I tackled the large vista seen at the end of my game level. After looking at the frame rate from the top of the mountain I ascertained that I need to do something to bring it up a little before adding anything else to the view. My initial thought was to check to see if UDK terrain did LOD'ing, and after a little research I discovered it did, but it wasn't initially set up as a lot of cases don't need it. I discovered that this helped my frame rate an awful lot, but decided to also take a slightly more aggressive approach to my terrain LOD'ing. I used the terrain splitting tool to slice off the terrain that went out past the lake as I though that it really didn't need any where near the amount of detail the rest of my terrain had. After slicing it and reducing the tessellation however I found there was a black seam line where the two pieces of terrain no longer matched up correctly. I remedied this by simply creating some low hills in front of the seam line to hide it, and from the top of the mountain you couldn't tell the difference. Doing this again increased my frame rate form the top.

For the background I initially tried creating a large cylinder that encompassed the whole level with a large panoramic picture of a mountain range on it but this didn't work very well, it looked far too out of place and didn't blend into the sky dome very well either. My second attempt was far more successful though, I created new, very simple tessellation mountains that I then placed around the edge of the level and ensured they filled the gaps in the valleys and hills I created earlier. I found that these looked an awful lot better than my previous attempt as they used the same materials I used on my main terrain earlier. To then make the background mountains look ever further away I created a height fog that started just before where the mountains started, the fog gave the mountains a slightly blurred/out of focus look as well as giving the mountains a slight blue/purple hue which added to the illusion of distance. I then combined this with the depth of field effect in the UDK post processing world properties, to blur the image very slightly when it gets out to the mountains.

Once I was happy with my mountains I moved on to creating another scene prop which was a simple solar panel that would be viewed from a distance thus it only needed a very simple texture and polycount. I then gave the material a very bright specular so that it would catch the light a reflect back very bright just a like a real solar panel.

Next Week:

As this is the last University week I intend to have the remaining scene props modeled and imported, so the level is ready to be polished over the christmas break ready to be handed in on the 14th of January.