Fire!

The center piece of most pubs is the fireplace and especially in a olde worlde pub or a fantasy pub. Fire was therefore going to be really important for me to get right in this project; so tonight with the help of a youtube tutorial I have learnt fire! Well I've got to grips with the basics of particle systems and the possibilities of the material modifiers which is pretty damn exciting because before now I've only had a really simplistic understanding of how to use the material modifiers to achieve something other than simple diffuse, normal, specular and emissive textures.

With this new understanding of how to do things in UDK I'm realising that the technical side of the art is really something that I enjoy. I'm looking forward to using Kismet and the other flow diagram style programming which is just a great deal more satisfying than slaving away over the HTML, PHP and CSS that I've been getting angry at recently.

I recently visited a pub locally known as "The Pub With No Name" as there are two pub sign posts signalling its presence to the country road its situated off and neither of them have a pub sign in them. The building is a mishmash of original building and extensions of various sizes and ages however the bar is still in the original area, the colours were fascinating and the entire place was really beautiful. The walls, which from the outside are a pale ochre-y colour of faded white, are completely brown indoors because of the tar from tobacco smoke over all the years. This was enlightening as my logical brain thought the opposite would be true, I hadn't taken into account maybe a hundred or so years of smoke. Again the fireplace and the atmosphere was incredible, the comparison between outdoors and indoors was something incredibly bizarre walking inside everything is brown, black, brass or reflecting the fire...

Heres the fire tutorial I used, this guy also has some pretty sweet tutorials on other things and different engines great help: