During production:
This was particularly fun to make with ZBrush, and setting the shader up for it in UDK taught me a lot as well.
I wanted to design a single rock that I could use in multiple places but have the moss always facing up, and this is the result.
I had designed the entire map with landscape and then I replaced it with a static mesh to increase performance.
Due to the usage of alpha cards already I couldn't create a normal texture the traditional way (Projection). Instead I set up a camera and the lights and created it in a way that would allow any alpha masks.
I used billboards to create all my distant trees, and once I placed them all I selected them again, re-exported and imported and replaced them all. That entire scene (The tree's) acts as one static mesh, with a total of 3 draw calls.
Rather than test it in my large level I always tested in a smaller zone to see if it looked right. Here's a picture of my testing.
A snapshot of the rig and animation I set up for the alien device in my level. It taught me quite a lot to set this thing up. I'm quite happy with the results.
This matinee had a lot of cameras, a lot of lighting effects, sound effect control, and animation effect control. It was a lot of fun!
This streams the levels in and out, as well as controls the camera's during the matinee sequence.