GA228 Blog: Trailer

GA222 Blog: Character textures, first pass

Had our first crit on the character textures recently. I'm really happy with how well he fits with the car.

GA228 Blog: Race Track

Here's a couple of runs through my track to show all of its features. It lacks a lot of visual polish but hopefully people think it's fun to play. My car's reflection doesn't match the level because it currently has the Best of Ringling shader on it.

GA240 Blog: Speedometer HUD

Now that it's an assignment, I've made a HUD for my speedometer.
Examples in this video are a full circle, a corner with the rotation constrained to one quadrant, a particle and a static mesh (one faces camera, one turns with the car), and finally I got decals/spotlight projection working!

Here's the material and kismet for the corner element. The Sine and Cosine have their frequencies set to the max speed of the car x4. This is to constrain the rotation of the needle to one quadrant without any extra math in kismet.

The projected versions both have problems, as can be seen in this screenshot. Decals have clipping issues depending on how angled the surface is. Spotlights project perfectly but don't show up well, especially in lit areas. Clipping due to a material change, this was fixed when I went back to a quadruple blended vertex paint. Decals work fine.

Wiesmann GT MF5 speedometer research
I think I'll use that digital display for the boost indicator.

Wavy Grass in UDK

Mike had the idea of doing grass inspired by Viva Piñata. It's a little hard to tell from screenshots of the game but if you zoom in, the grass is actually made of shells like the fur in SOTC. http://youtu.be/taIuZAGOFTo (see video description for a more in-depth look at fur)
Since the Vertex Color was already filling each shell in a gradient from top to bottom, I had the idea to use the same colors to drive an offset and make it look like it's waving around.

Please note that everything was made with placeholder assets. I haven't gotten to refining the art in my level yet. I think this will look really nice once I swap out my leaves texture for a proper grass alpha.
Because all 3 Vertex Color channels are storing the same values, this doesn't really matter, but I meant to append R and G, not sure how B ended up getting plugged in there.

GA240 Blog: Particles

For all of my particles I tried to use the Vertex Color node in ways other than intended. For the smoke, R and G are used to offset the animations (sort of redundant using both) B is being used to drive the color (would have had more control using two channels here instead). For some reason Initial Color and Color Over Life seem to try to overwrite each other, so even though I'm using A normally, I wasn't able to animate Alpha Over Life like I planned. (fixed, smoke fades out nicely at the top now)
For the bright, round specks in the smoke I'm using R and G for color, B to give them varying shapes, and A for brightness. (these were all pretty much pointless because color could have just gone higher than 1 to control brightness and the specs are so small that the varying shapes are undetectable).  It should also be noted that the material for the specks uses zero textures.
For the lava splash, there's no need for transparency so I'm using the Alpha as a way to animate the splash with IF.
I had a few more ideas of alternative uses for the Vertex Color node but didn't have a reason to use them for these particles.
Here's video of my mushroom particles.

I started work on the lava splash but didn't finish.
I worked on the post-processing, made a scene depth mask and created a color shift, just haven't tweaked it to look nice yet. The distortion was just a Dolly Zoom, I don't know why I thought it was post-processing.