Rebuilding a Motorcycle

I had done a model of a Yamaha R6 a while back and was pretty satisfied with it. I have gotten positive comments from people on forums who like it, but where saying that the geometry was weird. I went back to the model, which has a horrendous amount of unnecessary detail (this was back when I was first learning 3D modeling). I took the bike apart, piece by piece, and optimized the edge flow and poly count. The original tri count was around 61K, now it's down to 14.3K...and also looks better :). I wasn't happy enough, yet, so I imported it into Unreal and created a custom carpaint shader, because most car paints seen in FPS games aren't the best. Here's the shading network I developed:



I would like to maybe use this model in a level or have it as a custom vehicle, but I don't think I want to get into that yet.

Prefabs with Included Kismet

Today I discovered creating prefabs with a connected Kismet sequence. This proves to be immensely helpful, as I am dealing with breakable actors and it's a pain to place all the pieces each time. Here's what I did: create the original base mesh in 3DS Max. Then, I cut and selected proper faces where I thought would be logical for the mesh to break at. Then, I created inner faces, because it would look bad to have a piece disappear and then see through to the next ;). I placed the pivot in a good location so that they would somewhat snap in unreal, then imported. I placed them all as KActors and assigned them certain properties such as Movement>physics=None (because they would move when shot, otherwise). After they were all connected I created an interchangeable Kismet script in which I could set variables independent of the function (remote event, in Kismet) in which I called "Column_Break." With everything set up and working, I created a prefab out of the selected KActors. Unreal asked if I wanted to include the kismet script, to which I had two words to say: "heck yes!" This worked surprisingly better than I thought it would. When I placed the prefab, it had created a sequence and sub-sequence with the script and all actors set up accordingly. I cut and paste this into my own sequence to make cleaner :). I noticed how "take damage" was still local to the original Kactors and this made me sad, for a second...but then I converted the prefab to its original actors and presto, all references were updated in kismet! This has been a smooth experience with my first breakable actor, and I want to make more now.

Mines WIP

I've been starting work on a mines level for a group mod that I am apart of (serving as art director as well). The idea started with a concept drawing of mine, then a floorplan, and I've been modeling in max and importing and testing continually in Unreal, to make sure that proportions and collision are correct. I'm going to be smoothing out the surfaces some more and start adding man-made structures. Another person in the group is working on assets, and I will be placing those soon as well. Now that I have most of the level blocked out, the next step will be to start placing triggers and scripted events. Here are the current screens: