Final render

To finish off I used the in game rendering tools in UDK to produce a beauty render of the diorama with correct lighting and composition.

Asset placement

Finally after all of the materials had been created and all of the meshes had collision applied to them I began to place the assets in a good and presentable arrangement. Finally I ensured that all of the asset's light maps were correct by building the lighting on the level and fixing any issues.

The complete package

Above you can see the complete UDK package including all meshes, materials and textures. All of the meshes have complete collision and have the materials applied, including decals on the main digger.

Creating materials using shaders

The first thing to do once in UDK is to create the shaders that the materials will use when applying the various texture components to the mesh, above is an example of a simple material with complete diffuse, normal and specular connections.

Lightmapping

The final step in preparing the assets for use in UDK was effective light mapping, in order to achieve this I duplicated the existing UV sets for each of my assets and began to unsew and resew sections following a set of rules. Firstly that every shell needed to be approximately two grid spaces apart and secondly that any sewn shell which contained an edge of 90 degrees or more had to be unsewn and made a unique shell. This process was more time consuming than actually difficult.

Specular Maps

The final stage of the texturing process for all of the assets was to create specular maps, to do this I took the layered PSD files for each of the diffuse maps I had created and chose certain layers to alter in terms of brightness. The reason for this was to ensure that once I flattened the image and desaturated it and altered the levels of the image that these sections would still remain fairly bright. These sections included the windows as well as shiny metal sections.

Diorama textures

I made continued use of the photo reference for the diorama textures, using dirt textures to add depth and custom brush to add variation and detail in much a similar way as the main digger asset.