At first, all I was planning on doing was what was explained in the project briefing, design, and texture a castle and export it to an engine with a base terrain. Half way through the project I found myself expanding the scene in UDK, I wanted to make a scene that I could look in any direction and the world would appear full without seams or voids. I chose to do this possibly because I used to make maps for Counter-strike where I knew the level had to appear seamless because players had the freedom to go anywhere withing the map. Because I chose to do this It meant that I needed to create a lot more assets then was necessary. I created long distance trees and various other assets including a hilltop kingdom with a village.
Another feature that I included was the addition of a secondary bridge. Initially there was just going to be the footbridge, But it bugged me that the front of the castle was without a bridge, so I got to work making a bigger (horse friendly) bridge. I went back to my references, and I really liked the idea of an aqueduct style bridge. The bridge also looked really good from a long distance linking up buildings in the terrain.
The way I went about importing meshes was by importing finished, unfinished or un-textured assets. I knew that I could re-import textures or meshes when the time was right. By doing this it gave me an idea of what the scene looked like and it gave me ideas of what was needed and what else I needed to put into the scene. Also by doing this it made it easier to combat issues with meshes or textures, and I could organize my packages easy by doing it gradually, rather than importing everything in one go.
There has been many times that I've totally restarted models or re-textured them. This is true with the texture of the main castle. It was the first asset I made, so naturally it was the at the point where I had the least experience. When I did the UV mapping I didn't use up all the space, and therefore the textures had a terribly low resolution.
There were 3 rules I used to achieve higher resolution textures, first there is making things modular, by doing this it means there are less surfaces to UV map, and you can make the faces larger in the UV texture editor. Secondly is using up as much room in the UV texture editor, more room used means more resolution area used. and lastly is tiling textures. Making a subtle texture without noticeable features and a seamless border means you can repeat the UV more than once, this means there will be more pixels on the surface with multiple use of one texture.
If I could change anything now it would be the amount of detail in my assets. I was constantly worrying about polycount, it was only until later I discovered that I would have been safe to add more polygons than I did. For example I could have beveled 2 or 3 faces onto edges instead of 1, and I could have smoothed a lot more assets. But as long as it's not too visible I guess It doesn't hurt it too much. Another thing I would have liked to have done would have been creating the castle last. It's the most important part of the scene, and I did it first when I had only a little experience, therefore I believe It's of lower quality.
Overall I'm happy with my progression, I'll for sure be doing more asset creation within Maya In my free time. I feel I've developed a clear understanding of the features and tools withing the software. When it comes to the game engine, I think in the future I might try UE4 or Cryengine since UE3 is soon to be replaced by Epic's new engine. I still need work on my UV maps, I feel I could make them cleaner with more practice. BA3 has been my favorite out of the 3 units in my first year, and I might choose 3D environments as my focus in the following 2 years.
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