Fourth Week of February

This week I began adding static meshes around the lake and waterfall to make it more realistic. I added trees around the edge of the lake and included particle emmiters to blow leaves accross the track.




I added static meshes inside and under the waterfall to give it depth and a realistic reaction when it reaches the water as well as static meshes along the tops of the cliffs to break the uniform lines the terrain tool had left.



I also added particle emmiters to the lake to release bubbles in the water, these are hard to show as they are quite small but the effect makes the water seem much more realistic.

Third Week of February

This week I completed work on my stadium and began texturing it, following advise from my tutorial I did not individually build each spectator in the stadium but instead created a series of planes behind one another onto which a crowd texture was added. This means that it retains the depth perspective I intended without massively increasing the polygon count of the model.

Second Week of February

This week I began the modelling of a ramp for the track to waterborne transformation.

I began by constructing the ramp in 3ds max before exporting it to unreal, my first attempt, although it appeared graphically good, was far too heavy on the graphics of the map. It required 26,000 polygons to build it which was at least 100 times more than it should have been.



I followed some tutorials and read a guide on modelling for games and constructed the ramp again using poly editting tool in 3ds max which allows me to split, connect and extrude edges and faces of a shape to build a large complex model from only one base location. This also allows for UVW mapping of the texture and a much lower polygon count. The final version of the ramp is not fitted and working on the game with a polygon count of only 238.