The Apex Observatory: Final block-in and a texturing test.

Opted for a mashup of A and C, and I decided to move the platform out further so players arriving by the elevator can get a better view of the structure. The building itself isn't very modular, but I intend to make good use of tiling textures and material effects for things like snow.

I also did a quick texture pass on the walkway to probe for any oddities surrounding how UDK handles textures and UV's. I discovered that shadows won't render if the UV's go outside 0-1 space. And I ran into a problem with baking lightmaps. It seems like meshes with transparency won't cast shadows when using Lightmass, although realtime shadows do. Apparently this is a bug with the May build, but a workaround is supposed to be to change the material Blend Mode to BLEND_Translucent and set Cast Shadow As Masked to True but that isn't working either. Very odd...