The Home Of The Dew

Spacebar - Do Sick Jumps

As for the the character size, I initially panicked and cursed my mathematics skills for failing me when setting up the scaling a pipeline ago, but I found the solution and was very easy to implement. I went to the character blue print and manipulated the model transformation, which also handled the collision capsule. Camera needed a few adjustment but everything turned out fine.

With the controls completed, I am finally ready to test my character out for the first time and run it through the engine.

I have reached the second blue print of this development which is foocused towards the actual character’s functionality and properties raher than the animations. This step was very simple, set the character collision and the player camera that will track the model.

The tutorials were really helpful with introducing me to Animation Blue prints and the principle behind State Machines. I did have a short experience with major programming so I was able to quickly pick up and relate with the points the tutorial was making regarding the subject. Finally I got stuck in with the animgraph which was relatively easy to get familiar with. With the help of the tutorial and the state machine principle, I broke down the animations accordingly through conditions which is very reminiscent of a programmer’s pipeline.

Just a reminder that these series of blogs are heavily inspired by the series of tutorials that the academia has recommended for me to use. This is a preview of the following major steps I made to setup the input settings which will be functional when I have completed the character. I have noticed that the recommended settings are leading to an inverted look up and down mouse settings, but I have decided to follow on for reference sake. I am more a fan of the traditional directional controls.

One note: I did not picked up a running animation from Mixamo due to the cost of $15 ($20 USD) it required. My character will appear to have walking speed available, I could say he has advance form of osteoporosis due to poor financial situation to afford medical treatment.

The scene setup was completed and lighting was applied. Some shadow bleeding did arise after attempting to use static lighting. After playing around with a  few solutions which included manually re-adjusting each light map on my models and failed, I have opted to set all the lighting into movable state. With a bit of adjustment I managed to reach a pleasing outcome. It probably does not measure to the same level of detail if I were to have successfully applied static lighting, but in this case I only had enough time to work around what I have already attempted to amend.

10. Make any adjustments I feel necessary to character movement settings (from blue print)

He appears to be the most appropriate looking character to use in my setting. a real bookworm he is.

In the positive note, I have gone through some video tutorials on how to get started with setting up a character in UE4 (a lengthy process in itself) and have gone through Mixamo to choose my creative victim. 

During this learning process, I was able to learn many techniques and practices in modelling as I had very little of it before the commencement of my assessment. While I learned about very useful and fascinating subjects I had known little of such as normal maps, specular maps and real time rendering, I came across some issues that I were never able to solve during the length of Assessment 1. The biggest flaw I was not able to trouble-shoot was the degenerate tangents that UE4 has notified me that my models all had. While this problem is unsolved as I write this reflection, I am determine to find an explanation, and perhaps even a solution beyond the production limit our academic requirements have set.

With my assets properly categorized, it helped ease the burden of the editing process especially when it came to setting up the materials. This task was the most taxing on my machine and going through the materials one by one and setting them up individually was time-intensive. I also used crazy bump on the side of my pipeline as it helped me observe the effects of each specular and normal map on my objects. I was not able to discover why maps such as those displayed very oddly in Autodesk Maya, so applying and previewing them in UE4 proved to be the more effective route.

Made my first few modular segments of my corridor. I am quite pleased on how they turned out, although some seam issues still persist. I believe that they match the thematic design of the concept very well.