Escher Room

Relativity by M.C. Escher.

This image inspired a gameplay aspect of my map.

I wanted to create a room for my map which resembles painting by Escher. I plan to create a room which can rotate, so the player has to traverse a room with changing gravity.

Here is a rendered image of my Escher room.

I created this in 3ds Max. I created it as one object so it can be placed in UDK as an Interp Actor and thus be animated.

Collision Error. To create collision for my room I copied the object and name it UCX_room and the original object was called room. This is how collision is made for objects. However when I tried this the collision seemed to be eratic. This is a problem I will have to sort out to finish this map.

Office Assets

Here are some static meshes I created for my map. They are created to fill out the office environment.

Here is a desk

This is an office chair I created.

This is a door I've created, in UDK these can be animated to open and close.

Changing Material

My Objective was to create a material which transforms into another material. I looked into the various nodes found in the UDK material editor. I managed to achieve this effect by using a Linear interpolation node (LERP) and a flipbook texture sample.

This is a link to a video tutorial on how to create a flipbook texture for UDK. A Flipbook is a kind of texture. It will cycle through a set of images to create a basic animation.

 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hh8nV5ImJDk

Here is the Udn website. This is were I learned about the LERP node. A LERP decides which texture to render, the Alpha value decides which texture to render. The Black part of the alpha value will show value A, the White part of the alpha value will show value B and grey parts will show a mix of the two.
http://udn.epicgames.com/Three/MaterialsCompendium.html

Here is a Flipbook texture I created. It is made of squares ranging from pure white to pure black. The Flipbook texture will cycle throuygh these values to create a gradual change from white to black. This texture will be an alpha value for a LERP node.

Here is the material. The Flipbook texture acts as a alpha value for the LERP node, while two seperate textures are fed into the A & B values of the LERP node. As the flipbook texture cycles through its animation the A texture will change into the B texture.

Here is the material at an early stage of animation.

Here is the material at a later stage of animation. It's nearly changed into the second material. It is also important to note that the flipbook's properties can be changed from Looping-true to looping-False, so rather than a cycle I can have the material change and then stay that way.

Office Cubicles

Here is a cubicle wall I created in max and imported into UDK. I've modelled each segment individually so I can ceate a custom layout easily.

Here are the segments laid out in an office style. They work well.

Corridor Puzzle -- Assets

I am experimenting with a puzzle aspect of my map. I intend for there to be a puxzzle near the beginning of the map which will involve corridors which will change shape and layout as the player travels through them. This will create a feeling of confusion for the player.

here are some basic corridor segments I created in max. I had to create these as meshes because subtracted/additive geometry cannot be animated in UDK.

The image above shows how the corridor segments can be implemented. The 1st state is a dead end, while the 2nd state leads into another corridor. I plan to create an puzzle where the layout of the corridors will change as the player travels through them. This will get across a feeling of immersion. The player will have to think to get through the maze. These pieces are placed into the map as Interp Actors, they can then be animated via kismet/matinee to move.

office blinds

Here is a protype model for my office space. It s office furniture, a sort of glass wall. often used in offices to make the most of limited light sources. I used to material ID functiuon of max to place two materials on this model. One solid one for the window frame and a transparent one for the glass.

Office Maze

This is a rough layout of an office based puzzle. I created this initial design to test out the geometry values for gameplay. I intend this area to be a puzzle based on locking and unlocking doors.