Week 3, Day 2: Lighting

I got a little more work done on UDK.  There was a short tutorial segment on layers (which are basically just groups of static meshes) that really helped clean up my level.  Every static mesh is placed neatly in a category.  Organization is so nice.

More impressively, I finally got to play around with lighting a little bit.  The "work lights" in previous pictures were deleted, and more realistic lights were added.  UDK has a neat feature that allows static meshes that have glowing elements to actually emit light in the level, as opposed to having to manually place lights by static meshes.

I added a lot more static meshes since the last time I posted pictures.  The place looks a little less like an abandoned warehouse and more like a post-apocalyptic bunker.  Take that how you will.

One side of the main room.

The other side of the main room.  I'm quite proud of that seating
arrangement to the right.  It's made of some concrete
siding and a severely shrunk pillar for the table.

The back room.

The back room with dark moody lighting.  So realistic.

The front room.  You can see a couple different colors from
different light sources here.

Week 3: Textures and Static Meshes

Okay, this isn't really week three.  I graduated from high school, and since then I've been too busy playing games from the Steam Summer Sale taking care of college stuff to keep up with this blog.  Regardless, after that brief "hiatus" I'm back!  I was having trouble scaling up the ceiling on the simple level when I left off last, but coming back to it I found a solution.  From there, the tutorials have been pretty easy going.  I finished up the basic layout of the room with BSP brushes, then got to make it pretty with textures and static meshes.  Here's what it looks like now:

The untextured exterior.  Look at that beveled ceiling!

The textured interior.  A bit drab, but better than no texture.

Static meshes added!  All the textures and static meshes come 

pre-loaded with UDK, so I can't take credit for

 those.  Regardless, the  placing and arrangement

 was surprisingly easy (maybe even...fun?).