Posts

Starting my Diorama Project

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Modelling The Main Assets First thing I started off with was one of the main focuses of the diorama. I went with a relatively small temple/shrine. I also have a bridge and gate entrance. The four plaques around the temple will host statues of the warrior monks that once meditated here. I felt like the inside of the temple definitely needs some kind of details or assets inside. The floor will have a unique normals map in the future and there will be shaolin weaponry on the weapons rack, totems and prayer objects on the table, etc. Bad Compositon After modelling the temple, I had to idea to create a landscape with a round moat surrounding it, with some trees and bamboo in one corner and a waterfall in the other. After getting very useful feedback, I realized that there is literally no composition to this at all and its very boring. So I needed to make a change. Sculpting the mountain After exporting a basic cylinder and few boxes in Maya, I converte...
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Particle Effects & Sound

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Sparkingly Immersive When I decided to add particle effects, it opened up so many possibilities. I was orignially going to make the circuit box in my game spark after using it, but then I decided to put the particle system on my extractor fan, which would be the end of the level after turning it off. The sparks instantly makes it look more threatening and adding sound effects would multiply that further. Sound Now with almost everything in place, my blueprints, all my assets, textures and particle effects. What's left? Sound?!?! This in my opinion is very important as without sound, you dont feel the responsiveness of anything you do in-game. I was quite new to adding sound but quickly found out how easy it was to learn, but how hard it is to master. I started putting ambient city sounds in my game as well as sound effects for footsteps on different materials, mainly concrete and wood. I also added a hydraulic audio file for ...
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More Nodes

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Flickering Signs I wanted my neon signs to flicker slightly, like they do in real life, so I found out a way to use the emissive channel that I exported from substance painter, and create this flickering effect. I also decided to use something similar for my lamp posts and ceiling lights for the buildings. I actually used my last years project for the health pickup, and translated that straight into this project. This just adds slightly more depth to them. Especially the signs, being a texture and not 3D as I was initially planning to do, there had to be some kind of thing to make it stand out and pop. Not only this, but the Chinese (hopefully correct) is actually appropriate for the scene, which adds to the environment and tells the player where the game is set, along with everything else that should point to it being in China too.
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Substance Painter

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Substance Painter  Substance painter is a software I'm used to using, so I know how to group materials and mask, etc. This is still going to take me ages to do, considering how many assets I have built. In any case, I will robot my way through the day, doing one mesh at a time. Luckily, the two substance designer textures I have (concrete and brick), I just threw straight into the Unreal Engine. This allowed me to just add the materials directly to the meshes and that's half of the game textured already; however I noticed that some of my UVs for certain meshes were oriented wrong and I had to backtrack to Maya again, fix UVs and reimport the meshes in my project to fix the textures going the wrong way. This didn't take too long but was still a hassle to deal with. At least 1/3 of my assets had this problem. Here are some of my textured assets:  Prayer Shrine                                ...
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Starting The Texturing

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Concrete My first and main texture will be concrete. Following a long and very informative video on YouTube I managed to create a super cool concrete texture in Substance Designer. This will be used for my ground and/or road.  After creating the concrete texture, I knew that creating more of these would be too time consuming, So I started to look for open source textures online, on the substance share page and found a nice roof tile texture with scalar parameters so that I could use them on a diverse range of materials.
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All of The Modelling

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Modelling and Details I have modelled quite a lot of things as you can tell from the extensive list below. Everything is UV'd. I am worried however, that I have become so absorbed in the blueprints and unreal aspect, that I have left texturing quite late. Hopefully I will have plenty of time to work hard and get everything textured nicely. I am planning on using Substance Designer for the largest textures of the game, so that would be the road and floor being concrete/ashpalt, and then the buildings being brick. Everything else, I will probably use Substance Painter and play around with the smart materials and layers to achieve a good texture. Slightly lazy but I have left it way too late to design a new texture for all of these meshes p.s. mind my spelling of some of these files.
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Death Animation

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Dying In-game I wanted to add another animation to the game. A death animation would be cool so I downloaded unreal animation starter pack and following a tutorial for respawning, I created new controllers and large blueprints just to make this work and it's still not perfect. This has been the most stressful part to implement into the game and the blueprint and functions are everywhere.  Player Level BP  Character BP New Function New Player Controller Character BP Respawn Location Character Animation BP
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