A short break.

I'm off to Manchester for the next week so work on the environment will be slightly slower than usual. I'll be working on some designs for the environment so the Egg and Egg Holder prop are now going to be ticked off my list. I expect I'll be tweaking the maps at a later date, haven't got the blood quite how I want it yet.

DragonEgg Video Example

So here's a video of the prop I've made and imported in to the Unreal engine. I've tried toning down the gold texture so the eye shouldn't be entirely focused on it. I decided to ditch the alpha style goo hanging from the egg as it just didn't look as I hoped it would, it also covered the nice rocky shell texture at the bottom of the egg. I imagined the Egg would have some animations in the final version like squirming and wriggling which would help it stand out more. Par particle effects like a fire and some splashes this is probably close to the final result.

View HD for best image quality.

UDK mats

Spent the last day and a half inside UDK, setting up material nodes for the Dragon Egg and Egg-holder props. There's still some work on both props left to do. For the egg holder I'd like to separate the blood on the rocks with a mask so I can set it to a separate specular power, at the moment its too broad. This'll be easy as I've already done it with gold dragon heads and I always keep details such as blood decals on separate layers on my photoshop master file for easy masking. The Egg is also missing alpha details such as hanging ooze. I'll also need to look into particle effects such as blood splashes and fire effects.

So far so good. Steep learning curve but surprisingly fun. Still lots to do! Trying to make some of my textures more dynamic and interesting to look at. All textures 1024x1024.

Eggholder_WIP_02

First UDK mesh and material test. All materials at 1024x1024.

Eggholder_WIP_01

Quite a large prop for my dragon environment (It holds the dragon eggs). I'll be putting it in UDK and fixing a few things, textures.etc. Updates to come soon.