Deadlines Deadlines Deadlines

So its been a while again since my last update, luckily thats because we have all been hard at work.
As team leader I have set a few deadlines in the up and coming weeks. I have been setting deadlines throughout however I feel perhaps I have been to soft before.
My main focus now is to get zones compeleted. I should have stuck to my original plan and not have let my judgement be clouded. The next deadline is for tomorrow I want all assests for zones 1 and 2 textured and ready to import by the end of 22/03/2013. If this is done we should be back on target.
I have also re-structured the way our meetings go about now; as I feel before they were too hap-hazard and certain members were prone to side tracking/railroading the meetings. Now each member must take it in turns tell the group 1.what they have done since the last meeting, 2. they hit the deadline (if not why and how they plan to fix it) 3. What they will be doing in the lab session that day 4. What they have to do for their next deadline.
I find that I have a much better insight now as to how each member works and what pace they are working too. I have flagged those who are lagging in pace and offered help and tutorials.
My main huge deadline is 31/03/2013. Some may feel that this is harsh but I feel like its begining to drag now and I'm a little fed up of the excuses. This deadline is set in stone and gives us five weeks to tweak and make our spiders.
My plan is to have 2 people working on the spider whilst the other 3 fix problems and improve things. Nikita as always will be working with the engine level.
There not much to say about whats going on right now as people are just completing their asigned assests ready for engine. If all goes to plan we have five weeks to fiddle with stuff and build the spider. fingers crossed.

Web Progress

I've been working on the textures for the webs. I figured out how to make brushes from some pictures that I took a while back.
Some of the pictures I used are of webs, others are of some weird dead climbing plants that I thought worked pretty well. All the pictures used to create the brushes are mine.
Heres some example pictures.



 

 

 

I made 5 different textures, all but the 1st are tileable.
I tried to make 2 layers of details, the background is kinda complicated and overworked but meant to be like that to make the web look dense. The top layer has stronger looking strands of webbing.

Heres an example of the textures.























I'm going to upload all the textures onto drop box tonight. I'm also going to try uploading the brushes I've made so that other people can use them to add to their own textures to carry on the webbing theme. Hopefully everyone will find them useful.

I quickly put the textures onto a few models to see how they look. Heres some quick screen shots of that. I tried to make some darker/lighter to mix it up abit.

Hope peeps like them.

Update

The biggest news is that I finally decided on the engine. UDK has a couple of features I like a lot, which can be beneficial for this project. First is an awesome material editor. Second is the ability to vertex paint in editor. Since we'll have to break the monotony of the webs somehow, creating several versions of the materials and blending them together can help a lot.
My only concern about UDK is the lighting, because so far it looks awful. But to be fair, none of the models is unwrapped properly, and shadow maps use UVs that are simply flattened.

Concept art for a couple of rooms

Here are the pieces of concept art I put together for the two rooms off the long corridor if anyone needs them. I'm sure they'll come in handy when we come to doing those rooms!

 

Padded cell

 

Examination room

Bit of colour

Seeing as we're moving onto texturing our first assets soon and I've been appointed the "colour guy" I thought I'd work out a colour palette for us to follow. The asylum is a derilict, abbandonned environment; a most unwelcoming place so first and foremost we need to ensure the colours reflect this. I was thinking we could range between blues and greens, with blue remaining the primary colour. We can also verge into muddy browns and dull oranges for metal work that may have rusted. However, this isn't to say that we need to stick to these colours religiously; materials like wood is primarily brown so instead of completely swapping out the colour for a shade of blue we can just add a hint of either green or blue. Underneath are the inital paintings I made which should only really be used as a concept as such; not so much a reference. It was more intended as a mood study. However, they're hopefully still of some use.

 

Underneath are some slightly more literal studies where I've taken photographs of various surfaces, not disimilar to the textures we will surely be producing, and tweaked in photoshop. Hopefully these might prove more helpful when it comes to producing our own textures.  

 

 

So when producing our own textures it isn't necesarry to completely wash out the colours or alter them completely. As long as they give off a hue that is somewhat coherrent with our pallette it will ensure that our assets work along side eachother. The fact that our work will inevitably look different from one-anothers means this should also help making our finished assets look as if they belong in the same world. Underneath I've placed a few colour swatches together to help give a better idea of the colours we should use:

 

 

The top four sets of colours should make use for the majority of or environmental assets including the walls and floors. However I figured the webs for the spiders should be more stark and stand out against the backgroud. The bottom left colours could be used for webbing and any eggs attatched to them. However I believe we can use RED to draw the players eye towards certain places. This colour should be used very sparringly however; I would reccomend using it on maybe the spiders' eyes and some of the smaller assets on the wall. Only use this colour if it serves a purpose though. You don't want to draw the players eye towards something that has little purpose.