Assembling the Room in UDK

Importing the meshes and textures to UDK is an easy enough process. So long as pieces that need to fit together were created at a fixed scale there should be no major issues, aside from making sure they're aligned properly on the grid.

The lighting is a little trickier. While experimenting with the primary light source I found it formed a similar shaft of light through as doorway as I'd expected, but the rest of the room didn't receive nearly as much ambient light as I'd predicted. There were two ways I considered to combat this; one was to add a second light, much dimmer than the first, that doesn't cast shadows. This would add a small amount of illumination inside, but at the cost of looking unnatural if not executed properly. The second was to add a second visible light source. I quickly modelled an oil lamp and placed the light source (complete with active shadows) on the spout along with a small flame emitter. After changing the colour of this light to an orangy glow it illuminated a part of the tomb quite clearly and had a logical source to solidify the effect.

With some basic lighting set up to show me what sort of camera shots I might want to take, I went back to modelling the tomb's contents. The "door to the afterlife", seen at the back of the room, behind the light emitter labelled with a letter "S", has since been textured using a pair of photos from cgtextures.com of an authentic spiritual door. This is and will be the case with most objects in this room. Each is modelled after real artefacts I find through research and textured, if practical, from photos of said objects if they are royalty free (while these textures in particular aren't for any profitable use, I wish to refrain from relying on Google for quick textures, as that's obviously bad practise in any industry!)

Th

Finishing The Ark

Continuing with the method of adding and merging cylinders I finished the statue. Not content with the overall shape I put it through a couple of turbo-smoothing modifiers to give it a more sleek look while greatly increasing the rather low polycount.
This was a great opportunity for me to practise pelt mapping a mesh, as I usually make things that are quire rigid and angular in shape, whereas this is very much an organic object. Pelt mapping works in a similar way to skinning an animal for its pelt, hence the name. Seams are drawn in strategic places and then the sections that are created by these seams are flattened and relaxed to create an even space for the texture to be applied.
I didn't get it perfect in this case, the joints around the limbs, especially the back legs, are far too irregular. But overall the texture is smooth and partly due to the material it is relatively seamless.

Shown in the image to the left are the various layers that make this model's material. The wireframe and shaded mesh are to the far left, and to the middle is the normal map which is generated from the diffuse map using a handy little program called SSBump Generator. To create the diffuse map (second from right) I usually export a render of the unwrapped UVWs and paint directly onto that image. This is then applied directly to the model.
The final and furthest right is the specularity map. This tells the material how shiny it is and where. The darker the map the duller, and the lighter the shinier. This map was easy to make in this case, the statue is the only particularly shiny part of the model, so making a greyscale copy of the bump map and leaving the parts that correspond with the statue lighter while making the rest of the image darker gave the desired result.

Anubis Ark

Something I haven't practised much in 3D is replicating organic shapes. Well, a lot of Egyptian gods are animalistic and anthropomorphic, so I have to give it a go!

One of the treasures of Tutankhamun's tomb is a large ark with a reclining statue of Anubis in animal form, a jackal-like species of dog. The box and base are easy enough, but the statue is providing quite a challenge, especially since ancient Egyptians seem to have been quite particular about the proportions of their statues.

So far I have the body and forelimbs. The body began as a cylinder, as did the shoulders before they were merged with the main mesh. The hindlimbs will probably work fine as cylinders too, but the head is where I'm unsure. I may use another cylinder, but I might get better results with a sphere.

Pots

Some simple pots to clutter the tomb. Spherical ones were made with a mixture of spline lathes and vertex editing. The square pot is a simple box with a few deformed edges.

Architectural Details

Now that the basic room has been laid out, I have begun to model the larger details.

After splitting the room into three strips to make texturing easier later on, I built a "door to the afterlife", which is a false, stone door with spiritual significance. Modelling this consisted mostly of simple extrusions and a couple of insets with only a small amount of vertex aligning required.

While the ceiling is supported by four block columns, supposedly part of the rock the tomb was dug from, I decided to add two decorative pillars on the corners joining the entrance corridor to the tomb. These are roughly based on a type of "palm pillar". Egyptian pillars were often made to resemble more primitive pillars that were once used in the region, which were made from bundles of palm or papyrus. This mesh is based on the pillar illustrated on the far right.

Room Base

Here is the initial model of the tomb based on the floor plan from the previous post. Only the most basic features are placed here to show where the permanent structures are, that being load-bearing stonework and the sarcophagus. The light green mesh will be modified to create a higher-poly floor mesh, and similar will be done with the brown pillars.
The blue sarcophagus will most likely be completely remodelled to make for a cleaner mesh.

Floor Plan

The focus of this scene is the central room which contains the sarcophagus and many of the important goods which would be left for the person to use in the afterlife.

The image below shows a relatively simple tomb, and such a room can be seen on the bottom right. The sunken corridor will house the sarcophagus and precious items such as canopic jars, deity statues and scripts. The outer strips will house furniture, foodstuffs and other more worldly objects.

Image source

A quick sketch of my intended floor plan:

1. Entrance stairwell
2. Side wings
3. Burial channel
4. Main support pillars
5. Sarcophagus