First Unreal Tournament Assets

Recently I have been working a lot, but think it's important to keep creative in my spare time after work.

Recently I have made my first Unreal Tournament cosmetic items; working towards producing quality assets fit for the game and marketplace.

For now I am focusing on a "Simple/Basic" set of items to cut my teeth on and get accustomed to getting functional items in-game.  One of the main concerns that is getting discussed on the forums is readability and optimization.  For an FPS game you want to maintain an easy-read, and a high frame rate... Much like in most games.

In my opinion the next-gen shaders are too expensive, and I want to reduce the number of passes and materials used for each item.  The supplied Beret (which actually looks like an Ascot hat) is pretty low-spec and I am aiming to match that level of complexity for my simple/basic set.

For now I will concentrate on these simple/basic items and creating a flexible and optimized texture set and materials.  Such as multiple tiling textures which could be applied across the set of cosmetics, flexible materials to apply custom colours/patterns and effects.  The built-in library will also be expanded and I will make good use of these - Meaning smaller files for quicker loading and rendering.

Unreal Tournament is a very fast paced game, and I think the "easy read" is very important, and having high-end and resource intensive assets less important than you might think.  UT (Unreal Tournament) is still in early development, but is looking very promising, getting in there early is a great boon to understanding the player's and developer's needs

My simple Fedora - Substance Painter Screen grab. (PBR)

The Fedora in-game and fully functional - Kinda looks okay without much further work already.

Unreal Tournament is in very early development (Pre-Alpha), but is already pretty fun to play.  The engine everything is still updated very often and is uncertain how everything will end up, and I will go along for the journey and enjoy the ride!

An early WIP of another addition to my Basic Set. (3DS Max/Mental Ray materials & renders)

The vertex count is more important than the triangle count, and it seems the vert-normals have to be imported as bi-normals, which increases the overall cost.  But I'll look into it, there was an issue with split normals and inverted/flipped normal maps in UDK3, but doesn't matter in UE4.

My next item is going to be more exciting, and not part of the basic set.  Some form of sci-fi Valkyrie helmet that has effects triggered in-game through certain actions/events.