Date: January 25th 2010 (Testing one two three)

Before getting to the progress of my present stage, I looked back at my characters UV’s and made sure that I reduce any stretching on each of the UV’s on the entire model.
From early lectures provided by Nick and also Alan Wales they both mentioned that saving UV space is very important and parts of the model could lose some detail because of careless spacing. I am very convinced that this is a very important factor to laying out the UV’s, however in the early stages of writing out my assignment (last year pre-production) I did promise to set out my UV’s in the Unreal way and this is why I will criticise the Unreal mapping layout.


So much space could have been saved in unused areas.

Recently I have some time away from work to try and get familiar with Unreal Editor over this weekend, which is what I promised myself I would do.

So at this point I have my low polygon mesh ready to put into the engine and I tried to import my mesh into Unreal using the Actor X –plugin for Maya 2008.
The reason for using Maya 2008 was because of finding out of all the errors other users have come across with Maya 64-bit and untested versions of ActorX, Maya 8.5 and 2008 seems stable.
So the mesh is ready and the first thing I try is importing the mesh into Actor X, “BIG ERROR” which even crashed out Maya.
The problem was that I have no bones registered to my character, so I’ve got to go back to Maya and rig my character.
So after another sleepless night and a few pops of pro-plus I rigged the character and successfully imported it into Unreal “JOY”.







Still needs more work, but its good to see some thing after staying up untill morning.

Date: January 13th 2010 (Minor setback)

At this point in the development of my character I feel that I should be very close to finishing the modelling and sculpturing stage. After I sort out the UV’s to my low polygon mesh, I can import the low polygon version and normal map into Unreal ED for a quick test.

Once everything is done, if I give the character a quick test in the engine I can quickly resolve any errors that may occur in the transfer process.

I need to start getting very familiar with the Unreal Editor because I have not used it before and I only know the theory of how to import characters from what I have read on the Epic forums.

However before the I start the transfer process, I want to check with an expert if the model is fit enough to be imported into Unreal and at the moment I can see that my character is over the triangle budget which was 8000 – 12000 triangles.

At the moment my character is over 18000 triangles, which will mean that I need to cut back 6000 triangles before my character is ready for testing.

I asked Nick Sadler if he could take me through what areas I need to cut back on (see pictures).

First of all Nick gave me an excellent lecture on why it is important to save as many polygons as possible and he explained how much information is held on a single polygon. Nick also to explained that it is very important to keep in mind what is viewable to gamers when they see your character from a 3^rd person perspective.

Nick took a closer look at parts of the model and made me realise how much polygons/ triangles I can save and what detail will never be seen.

From the lecture that Nick gave me I realised what areas of the model needs less detail and I stayed up all night correcting my mistakes.

Now the character is down to 12300 triangles and the hard work is paying off check it out.