Throwback blog from the old days.

So, the last few days have been spent re-learning blender, and getting used to moving stuff from it into UDK, and then putting the stuff back together again. The whole process was rather tedious, not really because of anything especially wrong with any of the programs, just, some things aren't obvious at first, and seem incredibly frustrating to use, and then once you finally realise what was wrong, it makes perfect sense. :P Anyway, lets continue!

Blender was a bit of a learning curve, made most frustrating that I had already learned the stuff before, just so long ago.

But, I slogged through it, and refamiliarised myself with the program, and am now quite enjoying using it. It has a few differences that I really enjoy, like extrude, which isn't anything new or amazing in itself, but the way it works in Blender is just so incredibly smooth, I've been able to quickly model convincing curves just by using extrude and scale over and over. The more i'm using it, the better it is feeling, not to mention the lack of a hefty price tag always makes it that much more pleasant to use too!

It hooks in smoothly with gimp for texture mapping too, which is always a bonus.

This brings us to UDK.

So after doing some models in blender, I thought I would throw them into UDK and have a check of how they worked out, import worked fine, had this nice little model in there, looking all neat and stuff, that was great! Exactly what I wanted. So I went to put a collider on it in the normal way. And... it just doesn't do it.

Try it with a different object. Works fine.

This was pretty weird.

So I started doing some troubleshooting. I tried using a different exporter, but that one didn't want to remember my curve modifications, so that was no good, went back to the other, tweaked a bunch of settings, still nothing. Eventually what I came to decide on, was that it just straight up didn't like to work with a basic long rectangle shape exported with fbx. Cubes were fine. Rectangles apparently just didn't like to work.

I know, right?

Anyway, after that, I ended up simplifying some of the things on the one model just so that I could make it dynamic and it worked fine then. A particularly annoying non-issue in the end :P Aside from that, normal mapping has been a fun time, learning how to strengthen them in UDK, if they seem weak (or weaken if they seem strong) it's all a pretty smooth process (again, once you get the hang of it)

Feeling pretty good about the software choices in general though, and the game project is slowly starting to pick up pace, and the asset generation has truly begun!

Now for some pictures for anyone that bothered to read this whole way!

Cheeky box box, he thinks he is the smoothest guy around!

That'll teach him. (Early messing around with ramped up bumps within blender)

From top to bottom (first to last), the progression of me fiddling around with different normal maps on the plank, within UDK.

A very simple job here, but I was really impressed with how it looked.

It's just so pretty, right?!

Here, our troublemaking placeholder robot breaks the rules!

Quite happy with how that asset turned out though.

More to come soon!