When modelling your creations, don't forget that there's alot more to asthetics in the unreal engine than just materials and polygons.
Custom particle, mesh and trail emmitters can be linked to specially named bones on your mesh. Light trails from glowing points, and steam from exaust vents are just examples of what is possible in this area.
While there are some means to work with these things using unrealEd, it IS unrealscript based work... so it's a good idea to get some help from myself and the programmers on the team.
We'll even be able to do a few prototype weapons ([url="http://www.sumea.com.au/forum/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=2908"]Example[/url]) if anyone's interested in using these to show off in their submitted screenshots.
Anyway it'll give us something to do, because we've been quite disorganised up to this point.
It's very easy to attach emitters (which cover most effects) to extra bones on a mesh. If the effect uses or has to be oriented to face a certain way (such as wall hit effects) then the bone must orient itself in that direction.
This can probably be rigged up even just using property settings in unrealEd, though i'm not sure if 100% of effect types are visible in the editor views.
you can also have "emmisive" materials and submaterials that are applied at full brigtness regardless of lighting. This effect is present on the walls of many levels (such as phobos2, where a texpanner and alpha mask are used to make a glow that runs up the cracks in the walls every second or so)
I don't know much about that area. You'll have to read up the ActorX plugin documentation to find out what's allowed.
Here's a tutorial on how to use ActorX in 3dsmax: http://udn.epicgames.com/Two/ActorXMaxTutorial
It appears that you're able to use either.
either should be fine as far as i know. i've only used physique, and that's what the UT characters use, but i'm pretty sure skinf works too.
also, i have a skin-physique converting script if anyone wants it:
[img]icon_paperclip.gif[/img] Download Attachment: [url="http://www.sumea.com.au/forum/attached/LiveWire/200543054625_phy2skin.t…"]phy2skin.txt[/url]
22.9 KB
works in both max 6 and 7 (and is quite reliable too!). rename the .txt file to .dlu after you download it
Alright, here's a question for you then since this whole game engine thing is something I'm clueless on. I'm having some trouble with the glowy bits in my design. Ordinarilly I'd just ignore that but from what I've read they have to be there as a way to tell the teams apart. So then I got to thinking about smoke.
Would it be possible to have part of a model, say the eye sockets, emit coloured or glowy smoke? I'm thinking that may be one way to solve my problem without covering the figure in little lights.
I'm working redesigning the head at the moment so hopefully I'll have some drawings for you to get an idea of what I mean.