Prism Level Update

Greetings and salutations! Today I will share a little bit of my prototype level for Prism. Here is what one area looks like in the Unreal Engine 4 editor so far:

Prism prototype level in progress.

As you can see, I finally have grass and trees and the entire map is now actually laid out. I need to cover the entire map with the grass and trees but so far it is looking good.

One of the problem areas I was having with the grass was making it look like grass. After many attempts, I finally just painted it myself by using a Photoshop filter and then masking out an initial shape for a blade of grass. Then I copied that shape and used the warp tool to create different blades and pasted them into a coherent texture I could use on a single plane. I then built up several of those planes in Maya and then imported it into Unreal. As you can see, the result is quite marvelous. However, the grass is processor heavy and it slows the editor down on more conservative systems (ones that aren't mine anyway).

Speaking of Maya, Autodesk just recently released Maya 2016. After playing around with it for quite  a bit, I must say that I am happy with the results. It is far superior over 2014 and 2015. 2014 was my go to so I think it is a big deal to find a version of Maya that is better than 2014. One of the things that I like the most is the new interface. Take a look:

The new Autodesk Maya 2016 interface.

The interface is very clean now with much more readable icons. The menus have been cleaned up from the mess that was 2015 and there are many new useful tools such as an entire sculpting shelf now. Even the UV editor has new tools and they helped me clean up some stretch issues I was having on Aphrael's face. I always had problems getting the face to have minimum stretching and now the new tools in the UV editor fixed it quite easily. I am very happy.

I am not for sure what I will post about next. Stay tuned though and sorry for the lack of posts last week.