Friday 23 May 2014

Adding the models to UDK

Here I will be exporting my Chinese village kit of models and placing them within UDK to create a small village. I first then exported each individual object from 3dsMax as an ASE file extension. Overall there were 47 files to export.

Adding all the static meshes wasn't difficult as I put them all within the same grouping of 'Meshes.' Next the materials were to be imported. At this point I like to add one material at a time so I can tell when I have a problem. Because I was using PNG's I instantly ran into a problem with my texture diffuse files. The texture came out in a variety of multicoloured yet some would come out perfect. I consulted our lecturer Chris Janes and he challenged me if I had given the page an alpha channel as within UDK if a PNG is used it needs one. To make sure it does, the texture needs to have the wasted areas either white or transparent. So at this point I went through all the diffuse maps and changed them so that they all had an alpha channel which then resolved the issue.





















The same problem also occurred with the specular maps and so those also needed to be edited. I then had to assign the textures to their model counter parts. At this point I realised my earlier mistake of giving them mostly all similar names, this proved to cause a few organisation problems when assigning textures.





























Here is a problem that I only encountered within UDK, within 3dsMax the above model uses separate texture files and is able to do this without any flaws, however within UDK the program does not allow the the user to use multiple texture maps for a single object, for example 2 diffuse maps per object. In the object above it uses the material 'Courtyardwallmaster2' but it also contains several mesh instances from another model. This seemed fine in 3dsMax as it allowed the texturing of both instances on the model however UDK does not. At this point I did not have the time to improve and fix this issue, however if I did have some extra time at the end of the project, this would be an issue that I would try to have overcome if possible.

In addition to this, whilst manipulating the models within UDK, I immediately found that the pivot points of each individual object did not retain the settings I originally hoped for. This was a problem that I would have also hoped to change however, I had 47 individual models to alter and thus I didn't have time to make the changes.



















Subsequently, this caused the above problem to occur. I believe that this was the reason why the kit within UDK did not function properly, in that I struggled to fit some of the pieces together and had to keep adjusting the scale, this was an issue with all the pieces that within the original design were not set on a factor of 16.










No comments:

Post a Comment