UDK Maya Level

UDK Maya Level

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I took a class titled "Game and Level Design" and it's focus was mainly on getting our hands on the Unreal Development Kit. The teacher attempted a new type of curriculum when I took the class, and it involved dividing the class into mini teams to tackle specific portions of the level. The idea behind the level was to be based on the story " The Masque of the Red Death" juxtaposed with elements from ancient Celtic, Mayan, and Asian art and aesthetic. With that in mind, we as a class decided that making a type of museum level with multiple rooms to represent the colored divisions aspect of the story as well as have them themed to the different cultures would work best.

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People were given tasks according to their known talent sets, so some modeled, animators thought out puzzles for interaction and used kismet, and I was tasked with lighting all of it and figuring out specific effects. The only unfortunate thing is that some of the people tasked with the modeling and animating of the Celtic and Asian rooms didn't really get things done on time, so the only room that came out as well as was expected was the Mayan room. My friend Jerimiah Bigley is an amazing modeler and was chiefly responsible for the modeling of the Mayan room. Another friend of mine, Senzela Saidi, was in charge of the kismet animations for the room.

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I get very excited about the concepts and ideas behind the lighting of 3d scenes. I want to take a moment to share some of my inspiration for ideas behind how I felt our level could be lit, as well as just general commentary on lighting as a topic.

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One of my favorite directors of all time has got to be Stanley Kubrick. He had such a deliberate and strong control over the power of framing and lighting, and he constantly pushed the envelope of cinematography. Of his movies, Barry Lyndon stands out to me a lot for his experimental control of natural lighting for his scenes. No additional set lighting was added in the filming of this movie. The movie takes place in a period where there was no artificial lighting, and he wanted to try and capture the feeling this gave by not utilizing any in the movie, as well as escape the norm of heavily costumed movies of that time. The candle lit interior shots were definitely the most challenging to tackle. He actually bought a lens that was a super-fast 50mm f/0.7 developed by Zeiss for use by NASA in the Apollo moon landings. I've attached a few shots from the movie, but if you get a chance you should sit and watch it.

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Another great Kubrick film I thought could play an inspirational role for scene lighting is The Shining. I would imagine more have seen it than Barry Lyndon, so not much needs to be said of it. I do think the spooky/horror like theme of the film is similar to what I felt I should try to achieve with the level. There are several long corridors and expansive rooms that feel like they play well to the idea of game level design. Kubrick really pushed the implementation of long steadicam shots in this movie, and I thought that could play a role in something like an in game cinematic for the level.

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A third Kubrick film that immediately came to mind was Eyes Wide Shut. This is a pretty creepy movie that has notes of suspense and mystery to it. This movie didn't come to mind as a direct lighting inspiration for the level, per-say, but that's not to say there aren't shots in it that might be referenced for this sort of thing. What came to mind more, were different aspects of the movie, like it's mood, the fact that it actually has a masquerade ball that takes place that happens to be really weird and dark, a few music tracks from the movie that are cool, and some other small tidbits of strangeness that comes across in the film. I'd suggest a viewing of this movie too if you haven't already seen it.

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I was tasked with learning what I could about particle systems in the UDK, referred to as Cascade, in accomplishing the task of experimenting with fire and how we might could use it to light the different rooms of our environment.

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I jumped right into UDK and Cascade and began absorbing information from tutorials and playing around. This all brings back fond memories of being a kid and making levels with DOOM and DUKE NUKEM 3D.

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The Cascade system is pretty cool. After learning a few ins and outs of where buttons are and little nuances of the interface, the bulk of the work comes from experimentation and learning from others (no to mention infinite amounts of tweaking). The system is meant for real-time rendering, so getting instant feedback is nice. One thing I've certainly learned form previous experience with particle systems is just how much of almost any effect is texture work - at least half. That's not to take away from the fact that you have to make those textures move in such a way that they are convincing in what you're attempting to communicate.

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Outside of just building a particle system for fire, I wanted to generate an environment for the effect to exist in so as to be able to communicate the idea effectively. This took toying around with the normal interface of the UDK, which of course was inspired by learning from tutorials and information.

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I put together a simple level to demonstrate the fire as well as some lighting and staging ideas. I find that contrast tends to help push ideas along, so in the case of this room, the fire being a yellowish orange, I wanted to supplement it with bluish water. To accomplish the water I needed a plane with an effective texture, a physics volume by which to tell a specific space in 3d to act as water, and a post processing volume to allow for changes in color and depth of field, which in turn just helps sell the idea that you're in water.

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Here's the small environment I put together. The fire and the lighting generated from it a meant to act as an important focal point. Again, this was just experimentation to help push along further brainstorming of how our level might ultimately develop.

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In making effects, it's at least 50% materials work. This is a sort of radial flare I made in Photoshop that I'd use to generate sparks for my fire. I felt it necessary to re-create the fire I'd made before and improve on it in ways. This spark is a subtle aspect of it, but subtleties count.

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I made a mistake and placed the main texture in the diffuse of the material, but particles display emissive instead of diffuse, so I wasn't getting anything at first.

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I redid the fire from the ground up by using a totally new, but much better fire texture, and the material I created was pretty similar, but just slightly more complex to give more control over its perceived intensity and general flame like nature.

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The fire consists of an emitter spewing out the fire material. Making it look like a flame comes in controlling the randomness of the variables that spawn it, spin it, change its size, color, transparency, velocity, and initial birth place.

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There's also an emitter for the sparks, and the smoke, which do similar things, but just in different fashions.

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So here's an image of the room that was supplied to me by a classmate, the Mayan room. I used some place holder static meshes to act as torches.

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I took the opportunity to learn a bit more about UDK's Lightmass GI to help things seem a bit more realistic. As it is, the room is a bit dark, but I'm working on that. From gathering reference imagery of fire lit areas, the light falls over pretty quickly, but is intense in its vicinity. I needed to work on correcting this physicality .

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At this point discussions were needed on the general setup of lights and their origination. A big question being if any of the level would be lit by "artificial" lights.

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I went ahead and made some value changes to light radii, falloff, brightness, as well as exponents for lightmass, shadows, and falloff.

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I like to use the "detail lighting" mode often to eliminate visual noise and get a better idea of what the lights themselves are doing. I do feel that textures play a large role in the effectiveness of lighting, however, so I knew having appropriate textures would be a massive step in making the rooms lighting better.

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I wanted to post some of the images I looked up that I used to gain some insight into the general sense that a fire lit environment has.

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One of the strongest sensations I got from fire lit environments was how generally dark they are. Fire seems to have a very extreme falloff, and therefore multiple sources of fire have to be used in order to keep a dark room somewhat lit. The strength of light near the flame is quite high, and the part of its perceived luminance seems to come from how intense and glowie the flame is.

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So as mentioned previously, if the level is to be lit only by non-artificial means, we needed to find many places to put torches, in order to keep things realistic.

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The other options are of course are to incorporate artificial lighting, or to fake the intensity and falloff of the fire lights themselves.

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I began by working on my fire some more. I forgot to grab a screenshot of my shader tree, but I made the fire a bit more chaotic by adding a panning, tile-able fire texture multiplied into the emissive, as well as a more complex rotating, panning texture via bump offset into my opacity. It has added some chaos to the flame itself and I like it more now.

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Part of meeting the requirements of this stage I needed to make different colored lights. To achieve this I duplicated the main fire material for each color, as well as made other instances of the fire to house those colors.

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Part of the discussion I had with JJ and Senzela about the progress of the rooms was that the lights and fires would be a base color for the rooms as they begin, and after the puzzle is solved the lights would then change. So here, the lights and fires were replaced with a more "regular" type flame and light.

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I also began to populate the other rooms with lights.

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As it is, the rooms are so empty and basic that it's hard to go real far with the lighting. As the rooms get populated more with models and textures, I'll find more creative ways, especially due to feedback from the modelers, to light the rooms better.

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I wanted to push this a bit more, but the idea behind this is the combination of all the lights and flames in the main lobby area. They'd turn their colors as the rooms are "activated" to signal a more centralized form of completion.

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There's a light and flame for each major color, and a red flame and light in the middle that will activate when all the rooms are solved.

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This is the upper area of the mayan room. The simon tiles and general closer proximity of everything in this area make it seem a little brighter and easier to read than the bottom area. I definitely would have like more time with that lower zone.

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I found that messing with lighting and effects lead me to dipping my hand into a very large amount of the UDK. It felt daunting at first, but as I got comfortable with the software it was quite fun.

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Since torches were playing such a large part of the lighting, I wanted to make the room feel as warm as possible, but moody and natural. The end goal, though never actually implemented, was to have the flames and light colors change when the puzzles were solved.

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Much of the lighting process is finding reference and inspiration of scenes you like, and then implementing those ideas in the engine by lots of finessing of dials and numbers. Placement of lights is obviously important and all things should be carefully considered. I'd like to have gotten the end animations sooner so I could have known better which areas needed more attention; as it turns out some of it is a bit darker than it needs to be. Lighting and effects just seem to be a very back and forth process.

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The final implementation of the things I learned over the course of this class really show themselves in the Mayan room. I'd like to have had a more robust inception of all of it throughout the entire level, but I do feel that ultimately I learned quite a bit, and that's really important to me. I really look forward to having a chance to implement this knowledge in a professional environment.

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