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Finishing Up The Ship

So hopefully now have your ship completely modeled and (unreaped?) and now the goal is to UDK itself. To do this you will need Actor X or Act Mesh. Just do a quick google search on Actor X it should bring you into the Epic Games Website. (Attach pic) Which should look like this.

Once your here, find the latest version and download it and follow the instructions to install it.

All of the instructions and how to go about it should all be here on the website. Just follow the links its pretty self explanatory and it's very easy to use. So it looks confusing at first, Just read through it. You shouldn't have any problems. Make sure to save an increments whenever you do any kind of significant changes to your work.

After you export the scene, using Act Mesh or Actor X. It converts not into an OVJ but into a proprietary UDK file. So you will not be able to import those files into your MAX or MAYA. So make you keep your original files and back them up i

n a safe location.

Assuming that you went through the instructions here from Max and you manage toexport your models the next step is to bring it into UDK.

Importing a mesh into UDK is very easy especially if it's a static mesh for an environment. The big import button at the bottom left hand corner. Just click it.

Find your file

Once you've gotten into the correct location, select your file and then open itand it should give you a little window here.

This is not necessary don't mess with this one when it comes to measures.

When you go to import textures that's a completely different matter.

Going back to the import process, when you go to selecting the file, for the sake of the tutorial i'm just gonna pick one, Double click on it and it comes up with a nice big window of tons of middle options.

Here it's very important that you click the right things. For the diffuse, specula and any glow nets that you have you don't really need to change anything makesure it's in the default. Blending and lighting the model, they can be changed

later as can mail d group, so you don't really have to worry about that. However

, when importing normal maps you have to be sure that you changed the compression setting normal map to normal map uncompressed. Obviously uncompressed takes upmore memory so it's , unless it's something charactered just go with the norma

l map.

When you do select this (compression settings - TC_Normalmap) and click ok however it will stay as a normal map. So if you're importing a lot of different textures just be sure that after you've imported, after you changed the setting fromthe normal map, and it goes to the next texture make sure that you changed it b

ack to default or normal map. Otherwise it will import the textures and it willmess up the color channels and the way it's compressed.

So going to a material that i've made before, what you'll do is right click the

material and should bring up the material.

We use this one for that.

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Alright, here you can see all the different nodes that make up this material. Inorder to get a new texture sample. What you do in the content browser you sele

ct the 2D texture which you can filter by clicking the texture box there. Selectit back to this window and press and hold T and click and it will come up with

a new texture sample that references the texture that you had selected in the content browser.

Bring in your normal map, specula map and your diffuse and you can begin slotting things into the correct channels too. These are pretty self explanatory for the most part. Diffuse is refuse map to fuse power is how strong that is. Emissiveis a go map, specula is, I'll how shiny things are. Specula power is how big th

e specula highlight is on the material itself. So if you want to say you want something to be quite shiny but you dont want the entire thing to have a gloss toit, you would make the specula power you'd make it quite high the max number quite high. And I'll go ahead set that up in a second.

A pasty and a pasty mask, those only come in to play when want to have somethingthats transparent, in which case I find that the best thing to do is to just us

e a pasty mask rather than mess with the pasty here go to a blend mask and thatworks out best if you ask me. Frosted glass which is glass that you know has allthese little bumps on it which is sort of behind its also great for water, likeI said it's self explanatory and it will distort anything that you see through

it. Transmission mask and transmission colors don't worry anything about those.Normal mat, sometimes your normal mats wont be as strong as you want them to be.Unlike the other channels you cant simply throw it to multiply it at a constantyou have to do something a little different. Which is Simply duplicate by press

ing control w and then create aim at - ah that's why it was looking for it. Butusing at you can make certain color channel stronger than others and you will get a better looking normal mat that is stronger in some areas, but once again it's up to you. Moving on to the specula power using a lurp which you can find in the utility right here just the mini inter pellet. What you want to do is you wan

t to grab your specula map, grab its alpha channel and putting it into lower case a and then create two constants by pressing and holding one and clicking and then set 1 of the numbers is the lowest value and the other being the highest generally once again it involves a little fiddling around but for the most part thelower number should be less than 5 but it should still be a positive number andthen the higher value should be less than one hundred as you can see here I'll

just mess with the highest value here so you can have a look. Laying down the form makes the specula highlight much much larger, putting it up to a hundred willmake it almost non existent unless you really move around the camera as you cansee there. I did something a little different for the cubes simply because as y

ou can see here there are little bits of chrome and a little bit of glass there.In order to get that really really shiny reflection that you kind of see in theglass there now we'll use merline if you want to have that kind of effect what

you want to do is pretty much copy the sets up I have here. This is the mask that I reduced to tell it what to make shiny and what to not. You make this a fairshelf just using the graying scale image you can paint iton top of your diffuse and exporter as its own texture also you also have detection sample here you have a lurp there and you have a duplicate of detection sample here.The reason why nothing is showing up in the little box is simply becauseof the dot product and the camera and the reflection vectors here. All of thesenodes can be found here. Takes a little bit of getting used to, and there are s

hortcuts for them. It generally goes that whatever the name of the node is, theletter it starts with, if you press that down and click it should create a node.Obviously there are some nodes that share the same press letter and they will h

ave different hotkeys but for the most common ones thats how its going to be.

A great thing to do in the UDK is actually to look at textures that the professionals have made and reverse engineering them. A great way to figure out how they

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did water or how they did a certain gun texture is just to look at their nodesand look at how they went about setting them up.

Once you've created your materials and you've imported your meshes. Double clickon the static mesh that you have and you should be able to bring up a 3d versio

n where you can apply your materials by doing this. Simply go to the correct material channel in max and maya selecting specific phases and objects and applying

a different material it'll keep that information when you export it to unreal.So if you have one object that you want to be 2 different materials, apply 2 different materials in 3d program and it will carry over to UDK. So once you know which channel it is that you want to apply material simply select it in the contempt browser, the material. Go back to your window and click the little green arrow and it should apply it. Also for light maps which help for the lighting of your models one thing you can do is go to mesh generate unique UVs and once it generate unique UVs you should be able to click on the lightmap coordinate index, this decides which UVs it uses. Zero is the default which is actually the main UVchannel its exported with and seeing as how you just created another set here.

You reset it to once and then the texture resolution for that and the lightmap.Anything above 1024 will really influence the render times fuel lighting so unle

ss its something very large I would suggest doing 5 10 or lower.

So once youve applied your textures next step is to bring the objects into yourlevel. As you can see here I already have pretty much everything in the level and I assume you notice but right click where you want to add your actor add actorand add static mesh. And then you have the crate and then you can move it aroun

d and place it as you want. For your spaceships, make sure everything lines up export the filter ships and everything should work quite nicely. 13.07