QuakeCon 2011 - John Carmack Keynote

Great new 3D engine technology coming our way from id. Always the inovator, this time the company does away with traditional texture mapping (no complaints here).

Hear about it all in this youbube vid.

First comment sums it all up:

(about JC) Dude taught himself aerospace engineering for fun. AMD, NVIDIA, INTEL design drivers and hardware to suit his code. Wrote a game engine on his honeymoon.

UDK - Transparent Materials

Got my first transparencies working today thanks to this excellent video tutorial:

Creating transparent materials and fractured meshes.

Just remember to make objects with transparency selectable!

And a great article on various Transparency Maps.

and here's the result:

Next I'll be tackling something I ran across today - Soft Shadows.

Edit: or triggerable animated meshes - sounds more fun :)

FBX - no edge direction support

When exporting FBX from 3DS Max I kept getting a warning message (which I chose to ignore):

I decided it was worth investingating and came upon the following article on the AREA forums:

FBX doesn't support edge directions

FBX has always been my preferred exporting format but isn't always the best for low poly meshes where edge direction is a concern.

UDK Level - Begin!

Quick update on my UDK level as I test importing geometry and getting the hang of proper lighting in a scene. My goal is to get the basics down and then import a portion of our BIM projects for some real time snazziness!!

(i know it's basic right now...)

UDK work

The past week and a half or so my interest has returned to realtime environments, namely the UDK engine. I'm currently brushing up my skills and working (slowly) on a small environment to test some lighting ideas I've come up with. It's been slow going but images will be posted shortly!

Beginning a new UDK environment after a long hiatus. many thanks to these guys helping refresh my memory:

non-square texture maps & here

and of course the UDK King Hourences :)

and the ever inspiring Polycount forums for when I need some direction

3ds Max 2012 Generic Units change

after installing 3ds max 2012 and spending all day wrestling with it to export properly scaled geometry to the UDK, it would appear that generic units are now approximately .5 times their original size. write-up to come (primarily for my own benefit :)

setting up my twitter feed!

follow my updates on twitter: 3Deezle