Task 2 - Creating the Modular Cave for Scene 3 5.1.18

Creating the Modular Cave for Scene 3

The cave walls that I added in scene 3 were just basic models and were due for a change. For this design I went for a modular approach, a technique that is popular in the gaming industry. 

The cave walls in maya

To begin I first need to layout the dimensions of the wall. The cave wall follows this stricture:

• Cave wall: 400x500
• Corner wall: 100x100

This is to ensure that the wall cover the whole landscape in my scene and to help with the lightmap. This task was just an simple duplication with some work done for the arc which will act as the entrance to the cave.

The cave wall UV

The cave textures will follow the same design. Because of this I place all of the UV' under the same layout. That way I can add more detail into the textures and apply of of their materials in one go. If I was going for some extra details (such as height) then I have to do some separately.

The cave wall lightmap

The light maps are a different story. The UV's here have to be separate to ensure that I do not get any light bleeds. Each one also had to be on an angle to prevent any artifacts. The placement of each UV is also vital because I do not want them to overlap with eachother. The lightmap texture size is 256x256 so I will not a lot of issues with the model.

Because I am still using the old cave file I organised my asset struct via the use of layers. That way I will know which is the newest version.

In the Engine

The cave wall in the Unreal Engine

As you can see from the image above, I have not encounter any lighting issues from the new procedural model. I still need to addressed the roof and the textures themselves, but they will be addressed another time. I point that I might do to these walls is take them into Zbrush and apply some high poly details to them. This will make them look like actual walls if I follow that method. The variation will also be address via the use of the Unreal Engine materials. I parameter will be used to help split up the textures styles.