A vehicle does not get more awesome than this. Period.
It’s all russian on the site, but in short this is a sort of jet-boat that uses the “Wing In Ground” effect, meaning a wing has much more lift when it operates close above the ground or sea. That and it has missiles and turrets and 8 jet engines.
I started working on a character for a change. It’s not organic but definitely something different from the usual four-wheeled subject.
It’s the water armor from Yukito Kishiro’s Aqua Knight. I rarely read manga but this one was just too original to miss.
I spent the last two months working on this Hot Rod model, as some sort of fan-art for Brütal Legend. I really hope I can bring myself to at least creating some sort of environment for it.
19.652 tri’s, one 2048 set, two 1024 and a 256 set of textures.
I found another one of those great blog type websites that posts awesome pictures of abandoned places and other interesting locations:
I love how they also have some sets of abandoned vehicles:
Image by Hyperfinch
Photo from Ruud De Leeuw
Fascinating page, that last one. It’s about plane wrecks in Alaska. Makes me want to create a scene like this with that snow material I made for UDK…
Been spending a lot of time creating realtime images, this week (as always). I put my Cougar into UDK and set up some materials for it. I think it looks so good that I should just share it up on my blog here. This image was created at 6144 x 3456 pixels with Unreal’s “tiledshot” command. And that only took 2 seconds to render.
I’m looking forward to the day realtime rendering becomes the standard.
Due to an ongoing thread at the Polycount boards about the snow and ice of Uncharted 2, I replicated Paul Greveson aka MoP’s vertex blending material in Unreal.
This is my result:
The tank tracks are another type of blend, this one’s about the snow on the ground.
I was asked to post my node layout on my blog, so here goes:
The base mask for snow coverage is calculated by using the Red vertex color channel (you can easily paint onto one channel only in UDK, great feature!) and a heightmap. These are combined together to create a transition effect with the heightmap, where the vertexcolors fade out. Clamped at the end to prevent extreme values, just for safety.
Using the Green vertex channel, we calculate a varying number for the mask’s hardness. 20 is the ceiling value, a 1 is added to prevent powering to 0 (bad). The invert on the vertex color is just to make sure the default value is hard (default vertex color is 1,1,1,1).
Both groups are combined by powering the raw mask to the hardness value, adjusting the contrast. Clamped for safety, though technically not necessary since we’re only powering a value of max 1to20,resulting in a 1 anyway.
The mask is used on 3 LinearInteroplate nodes, to blend between snow and non-snow diffuse, spec and normals. Since I had the heightmap anyway, I just used it for a quick parallax effect on the diffuse (I should apply it to normals as well…).
Total material. Nothing too complex, only 63 instructions which really isn’t expensive.
I recommend doing this in UDK only, since painting vertexcolors is incredibly easy there.
I put a few more hours works into the map. Built some static meshes, set up fake bounce lights all over the place and tweaked overall atmosphere.
The entrance gate at the back is still very WIP, but I finally threw out that useless big placeholder mesh there.
As of 5 november 2009, Epic Games has released it’s Unreal Engine 3 to the public in the form of UDK, Unreal development kit. I don’t have to go in to all the details, but in my opinion this is a milestone. Ever since I worked with the latest engine version at ExDream this spring, I’ve been waiting for a newer engine version to fiddle with. I took some time now to get some screenshots together that compare Unreal Tournament 3’s levels with the revised ones from UDK. They show one of the greatest improvements, the Lightmass GI baking system.
UT3 is engine version 3809, UDK is engine version 5860. About two years of extra development and probably a few million dollars more spent on development.
Next weekly update on my map:
A lot more decoration was added. I did some work on the surrounding environment so there are cliffs and mountains around. Still need to place more in distance so the level doesn’t seem to end abruptly in the distance.
the ASC trees look really good, too bad there’s only one of each kind so repetition is rather noticeable after you used it a few times.
I added a non-functional door under the bridges, to break up the empty space and so the building bases look like they have some sort of function (locked cellars or whatever).
Still far to go, I need to build two floors on top of the main building, and the front gate is still just a placeholder. Those are next on the list.
