Rooftop First Day

First day back on the course, got our assignment to do the rooftop. I have been thinking what i want to do for the rooftop for a while and it is clear I want to do an amusement park. Nothing big because it has to be in the limits of the brief but enough to make it interesting. Todays challange was thinking about what assets i need to modulate to make the more use out of the tri and texture space we have.

Now because i want  to set my carnival at night time, there is a key factor;

LIGHTS

I want it to be so glowy your eyes burn, so in order to have a bijillion lights i need to think locially. I asked Heather if the same rule applied to us as the previous year.

Modulated items don't count toward the triangle count.

So this means i can have one light and spam it as it wont increase the triangle limit. So I spent my day thinking about UDK and how to set out to do what I want. Have multiple lights, they have to go on the same path, and they have to flash. So it has been a while since i used kismet and it took me a while to understand how to move more than one mover on the same track as the others. Here is the result;

Notice the multitude of actors...now image that with a lot more lights...it will look fabulous, the most complicated looking kismet you have ever seen lol. So once i finally got that set up with lots or trial and errors i moved on to my next problem. How do i create these flashing in a pattern? I remembered a tutorial that would decrease repetition in assets by using an overlay that would be offset to the world. My thought was to use this technique but apply it with a black and white mask that would make it seem like the lights were flashing. Because the lights will be rotating along with the rides then this seemed to make sense. And so many crappy tries and forum searching because it wasn't working i finally found someone that had a similar problem and was able to fix it. So here is the result;

Sorry for the not so great video, my computer seemed to want to lag but you get the jist of what i was trying to achieve. As you see i added a different colour as well and if it has the same mask and same number values then it will look like its going in a pattern.

And so ends my first day...I some what think tomorrow isn't going to be as productive but I will keep trying to post blog posts because its a great way to keep track and document the stuff while its fresh in the nogging.

Peace out :)