Last week, I attended GDC Online down in Austin, Texas with three of my fellow students and project members. We spent most of our time at the Narrative Summit events with speakers such as Dave Grossman, Matthew Weise, and the Keynote speaker Neal Stephenson.
In this photo: Jim, Richie, and myself

In the evenings we spent our time networking with Many on the writers and other narrative designers at a bar known as the Gingerman. We had amazing discussions with several of the most prominent people in the industry including the lead writer for Dead Space 2, Jeremy Bernstein. I must say I was impressed that many people that we talked to about our game showed a genuine and positive interest in our game. We also impressed and inspired other attendees with the work we've with DSU's Game Design program.

The past week I've been working on getting animated bump textures to work in udk. These textures are to serve as shadows creatures moving across the ground and offsets the terrain as they move.

The material I'll be making in this example is just to demonstrate the steps I took in making the material for the game.



The first step was to make a new photoshop document that was 512 x 512 pixels (the size doesn't need to be this specific size) in rgb mode. I created a black and white image for the desired texture, in this case I simply used black stars on white. I selected all and copied. Under the channels panel I added a new channel called alpha and pasted my stars into it.



Next, I selected the blue channel, clicked filter-->Stylize-->Find edges.
On the red and green I clicked filter-->Stylize-->Emboss. The settings can be whatever is desired so long as both channels have the same settings with the exception of the red channel 's height value which needs to be higher.





The final image should look similar to this. The image must then be save as a targa image with alpha channels enabled.







After the images is saved, import it into udk using the default import settings (with the exception of name and package location of your choosing).

Next create a new material in udk's content browser. Several textures and material expressions will be added into this new material.

2 copies of the bump material we created
1 texture for the diffuse (I used a texture within udk's default content)
an add material expression
a Bumpoffset material expression
a rotator material expression
a panner material expression

you can use the search bar to quickly locate the material expressions



Finally, just connect these items together as in the image. You should now have a material that has an animated normal and bump map. You can also experiment with settings such as in the panner/rotator, or invert the alpha channel to change the direction of the bumps.

This past week I've been creating a shadow effect to implement into the game using the things I learn from my research from the week before. First use photoshop to create the frames of the a flipbook texture. Next import it into UDK making sure to check the flipbook option.Once the flipbook texture is imported, edit its properties to select the number of vertical and horizontal frames, and the frame rate. Next make a new material and bring in the flipbook texture as a FlipbookSample and assign it to the emissive channel. On its own, the sample will end up tiled as it is projected from the light source. To fix this we add a panner connected to the sample's uvs input, and a constant with a value of .5 into the panner's time input. Finally, we select the use as light function option in the materials properties. Now add a light of any kind (I used a spotlight) to the level. Open its properties and look for the function options under lightComponent. click the blue triangle to add a function and, with the material selected in the content browser, click the green arrow to add the material to the light.


And that's it, the light should now project the flipbook texture in the level.

I've been researching material expressions at UDN to see how i may implement the shadow creatures in Ars Cerebra. I decide on using flipbook textures to create animated shadows. Thanks to Daniels finding a dynamic cloud shadow tutorial on youtube, I learned how to use light functions to project these shadows from a light source such as a spotlight.