Rooty Isles Small Isles Notes
Contrary to the purpose of the medium and large isles, small isles acted as mere stepping stones to other isles. A player would only need to take three or four steps to fully transverse a small isle.
To create a small isle a level designer generated two pieces of terrain in UDK to act as the top and bottom halves of the isle. Then the two terrains were sculpted and shaped before being exported from UDK as an Object or OBJ file. An artist would import the OBJ file into Autodesk 3DS Max to combine and texture the terrains. Next they exported the small isles as an ASCII file out of 3DS Max and imported them back into UDK. Finally level designers placed the small isles into the level where artists added final decorations to them.
To create a small isle a level designer generated two pieces of terrain in UDK to act as the top and bottom halves of the isle. Then the two terrains were sculpted and shaped before being exported from UDK as an Object or OBJ file. An artist would import the OBJ file into Autodesk 3DS Max to combine and texture the terrains. Next they exported the small isles as an ASCII file out of 3DS Max and imported them back into UDK. Finally level designers placed the small isles into the level where artists added final decorations to them.
Once fully decorated, a small isle and all of its decorations were converted to interpolating actors so that they could be scripted to move on orbiting paths. When players start up our game they could see many small isles moving around in the level like a choreographed dance sequence. The only small isles that didn't move were the ones with gravity cores, used to change the medium isle's formation, on them.