EPT![[image loading]](http://www.gameproc.com/meskstuff/BlackSun/Header-BG.png)
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5
Many years have passed since the UDK came out, and more yet since I long desired to abandon modding and enter a real, functional engine. However, I have always been afraid. This has become my greatest enemy - fear, and doubt. It is a truly unconquerable foe.
I cannot ask much of myself. I am fearful, and frail. My disabilities, my ineptitude, plagues my every step. But I must push forward. I have to. There is no other choice. Even if it's but a single step every month at most, I must make motion to the stars. Day by day my life draws that much closer to its end. If I cannot move now, I may never get the chance to again.
I yell at myself constantly. I make light the fears of old. I push myself as hard as I can. But the mind is only capable of so much, especially when it cannot depend upon itself. I did make one victory in recent times, however. One victory amongst so many defeats.
Steel thy thoughts, steady thy heart. If this is to be our final hour, let it be our finest.
Our goal is simple. I need many dozens of scenes to come out of the UDK for this project. Sins can only do fleet battles, and not even our biggest ones. I need to figure out how to do cinematics, lighting, and materials in the UDK, along with particles, which thankfully I come out of sins with enough knowledge to confidently say that, in time, I can at least have that. Everything else, though, will be a 180 degree vertical battle. To defeat the UDK I must defeat myself. I don't have it in me. But I must find that strength, or all is lost.
To begin, I require a scene. I choose Annashim's Chamber as my first scene to model. I don't have characters, and I probably won't for many months until I either rip them from something or get lucky with one of my contacts. The scenes, however, are all on me. I have this one in my head. It's not a fleeting parlay of lights and impressions like many. It's real, tangible. I can see it, I can smell it, I can taste it.
Some people seem to think imagining things is hard. It isn't. Translating things, however, that is the real challenge. So many artists lack aspirations, and so many non-artists have innumerable aspirations. That's the riddle, you see. I am no artist. But I will fight to forge my dreams no less. No matter the cost, I must succeed or die trying.
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/EZiLL68l.jpg)
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/fBHnMEql.jpg)
My scene shall be comprised of multiple components. The chamber, sans glass, and ceiling, walls, and floor shall be one object. The details will be separated in multiple groups of objects. The UDK has both a vertex limit and an unidentified triangle limit per mesh.
My scene starts as a cylinder. This is the chamber. I extrude out of the top and bottom to create the ceiling and floor. I don't know how to extrude fine details, so I'll cheat in the same way I cheated for the BSBC in part 5. This time, poly limits are wholly irrelevant. In fact, if I was an artist, I would be sculpting this scene and make a multi-million poly model to bake down. But I don't possess, and will never possess, such arcane skills. So I do things the old school way. The bad way.
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/I8liwVrl.jpg)
If I was an artist, or gave enough of a shit, I'd UV those lenses on the walls for special textures for specularity. Instead, at some point, I'll just split them and assign a unique material. The walls are bridged from a small extrude on the floor and ceiling, with an inset, delete, and bridge forming our door. In the scenes, this door will peer only into pure light and be the major source of light for the room.
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/A0sIOdOl.jpg)
Something like that. But lightmass in the UDK will have unexpected results, and I may find better lighting solutions in the future.
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/XIwGrPEl.jpg)
Very simple details. Cylinders are mangled and walls extruded. All in all I spend about 5-6 hours to reach this stage.
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/uYLOmMbl.jpg)
Scene is almost finished.
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/NKVIwcLl.jpg)
The scene is now finished, but I realized I have no suitable textures. The texture displayed is for ships in sins, its plating has very poor effects on our scene due to the lack of proper UV's. I don't need really specific uvs in this scene, so I mess with the tiling modifiers to get something appropriate, using the plating density to get an idea how things will look.
Ideally, I'd have a bunch of grunge/generic dark metal textures with respective normal maps, but as it turns out none of my commercial cds have proper high-rez full sets with normals suitable for this, and fewer yet have tiling textures. I make a mental note to dump and sort through the 3,600 fucking archives contained in Tera to find something more suitable. Until then, I hope the UDK has something suitable as a placeholder.
Nearly a week passes for me to scrounge up the balls to actually export this into the UDK.
The scene is about 180k triangles in total. Despite being rather wasteful, it's very low poly for a huge static mesh environment. However, I don't feel particularly pressed to super detail such a low-light scene, and furthermore I am an incompetent retard and don't know how to detail in the first place. I take what I get, I guess.
Exporting this to the UDK turns out to be a bit of an annoyance. I knew about the 65k vertex limit (the game reports different vertex counts than 3ds max which is a really, REALLY annoying thing to contend with), but there must be a tri limit, too, because most of the meshes silently bug the fuck out when imported. I end up splitting the scene into 11 major components.
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/t6Nrho4l.png)
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/GGkqjQ4l.png)
The results are immediate and fairly impressive. Using default textures, I cobble together respectable lighting and settings within under 15 minutes. I spend the next long while toying with settings and trying to make a suitable glass texture, importing pieces of the mesh with different smoothing/uvs, and overall tuning things. Eventually, I end up with this.
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/3M2vMx2l.jpg)
Once I get real textures I can go further. I can always add more scene details if I figure out how, and the lighting seems to have some odd issues with the smoothing I don't know how to fix. Otherwise, other than the lack of characters, this is ready for anything I want.
The next step is to figure out how cameras and kismet work. I'm still fucking terrified, so I probably won't even attempt to figure those out for a long time yet. Instead, I'm in a good position to move up in scene modeling complexity and try out some of my more elaborate ideas. And I have a functional chamber for the future production-level efforts whenever, if ever, I get said character models in my hands.
While there's still a lot of Sins work left, I feel more inclined to make as much progress in the UDK as possible and try to get comfortable with it so I can man up to attempting something that is actually more difficult than importing models. The problem with my learning disabilities and depression, though, is that they cannot be reasoned with or combated with logic. Every tiny bit of progress must be cherished, because it opens up only every so often.
