UDK

Importing The Assets

The first step within UDK was to import all of my meshes which had previously be exported on the centre point in Maya as 'FBX' files. For the meshes and diffuse textures, all i had to do was create a new package and drag them in from their file location, the normal maps on the other hand required me to first adjust their compression technique to 'Normal Map' or UDK wouldn't recognise them as anything beyond flat images. After getting all of these files loaded in to my new package, i was then entirely ready to create 'Texture' files within my package to connect the diffuse and normals together so i could then apply them to each mesh.

Connecting each component's texture together was quite a simple task, just forcing me to right click the package window and create a new 'Texture'. Double clicking each of these, i was presented with a menu with a list of options relating to their function within a texture and a small grey box next to each one. I simply dragged each diffuse and normal from my package in to the new menu when appropriate whilst connecting the diffuse textures to the diffuse boxes and the normal maps to the normal boxes.

Once i then clicked the tick option in the top left corner of the window, all the changes were saved. Looking at the previous on the left hand side, i could then apply each of these to the meshes. As i also had a alpha map, i created a 'Constant' and 'Multiply' node, attaching these to my specular which allowed me to edit the brightness of my original specular map at any time by simply changing the value of the constant node. This stopped me from having to jump between Photoshop every time i wanted to make an adjustment.

To then apply these textures to each mesh, i double clicked the meshes, one by one and under the 'LODinfo' tab, i clicked each of the drop-down menus until a material option appeared with a small green arrow next to it. By selecting the appropriate full texture file from the package and then clicking this option, i could instantly assign them. Whilst at this, by un-ticking the 'Use Simple Box Collision', 'Use Simple Line Collisions' and 'Use Simple Rigid Body Collision' i was able to instantly give each mesh full collision. I tried previously to create my own collision and also attempted the auto-collision options but none of these options ended up working correctly.  

The final step was to drag and drop every textures mesh in to the scene and with the maya version loaded up in a new window; re-create the scene within the UDK window. This may have been rather awkward but after a bit of trial and error, i managed to set up the entire scene, well under budget and was ready to take my render shots.

After adjusting the world sun direction and re-building the lighting, i removed the HUD via console commands, ensured the lightmaps were working correctly and then used the command 'Tiledshot 4' to take some very high quality screenshots.