#obedient echo

i’ll start off this post with the basic light bulb. there’s a light placed just below the mesh which is set to stationary, which gives it a dynamic aspect which lets it produce the really bright bloom effect

this light below is set to static which means it doesn’t produce the same bloom as the first one. you can see the spline mesh utilised here for the cable too, running down the rafter and down to the wall.

this was originally just created as a sort of test so i could throw some lights around the level, so you might notice this mesh in a lot of earlier posts. i originally intended to get rid of the light  bulbs in place of torches. the actual lights have been changed significantly however. i decided to keep this mesh in the end because i really liked the contrast of the torches and the light bulbs and how they gave this really harsh light. 

when you’re walking into a cell or down a corridoor with this light, and it’s only half visible because of the echolocation mechanic, the really harsh shadows and jarring white light make it all the more spooky because something about it just feels weird

here is the main light sources throughout the level though, the flaming torches. they provide light which is a lot less harsh that the light bulbs, and also a lot warmer. i didn’t think it was worth making a video just to show the torches, but they look a lot better in motion. there’s an element which looks like heat distortion as it rises. it’s subtle, but i really like it.

the actual blueprint consists of two lights. one of them is smaller, and stationary, which lets it flicker. i kept this one smaller because dynamic lights take much more resources to render in game so having it smaller is more efficient. there is also a much larger entirely static light which provides a lot of the fill light too. 

here’s the particle effect. in the content example particle level there was an example of black body radiation. this lets you specify the temperature and the colours will reflect that automatically. it’s a bit awkward to set up with the dynamic node in the particle system but it gives a really nice effect. 

and here’s the tiki torch version you can see in the blueprint above the settings which i’ve implemented to convert it to a tiki torch, which involves removing the dynamic light. during tests with the gpu profiler, i deduced having dynamic lights interacting with all the individual leaves on the trees is just a horrible idea.

 this is one of the outside sections. this bridge is lit pretty much exclusively by one light, which represents the moonlight. as a result you can see it’s pretty dark. only having one light source also helps to produce the same super harsh shadows as in the previous section. by having no fill light to fill in the almost completely black shadows it not only blends better into the black background, but adds an element of unknown. the player is used to clapping to reveal areas by now, so by having these completely dark section they cant reveal, it creates an uneasy ‘should i step here’ kind of feeling

i wanted to put a screenshot in here just to demonstrate the difference between the editor and the in game views. this enormous disparity made creating lighting for the scene extremely difficult, and incredibly time consuming, especially towards the end when i had to wait upwards of 2 hours each time i changed the lighting for a lighting bake to complete.

the sewer section was again a completely different lighting theme. this time i went for a very bluey green hue to the pipes, which tries to reflect the watery yet mouldy look of the cliché sewer. 

the sonar pulse was looking a little boring in its current iteration. the smooth edge just wasn’t working for me. in journeyman last year i remembered using the if node to create the rough edge on the fire material i created, so i figured that might help here. i basically took the combined opacity mask and compared it to the cloud mask texture i’ve been using for literally everything.

also in the video, if you've a keen eye you might have noticed the music box no longer pulses in time to the music. this is an unfortunate limitation of the engine right now. since it’s still early in the development, some of the plugins are still just tests. although i didn’t realise at the time, this includes the sound visualisation plugin, which means it literally doesn’t let me compile to an exe while it’s in use. i changed it for just a simple sine wave. this actually doesn’t look that terrible, and in fact might be better in some cases than the old solution because it keeps more visible for longer.

to help with the atmosphere, i wanted to add in some weather effects. as cliché as thunder and lightning and rain is in a spooky environment, clichés are clichés for a reason. i made the rain as a particle effect using gpu particles. this let me have thousands of particles simulated extremely efficiently. i wanted the rain to fall realistically, so i just added a constant downwards velocity which emulated gravity. 

this meant i could spawn the particles in an angle other than downward. in this case they spawn with an almost sideways initial velocity, gravity pulls them down, and the end effect is rain which looks like it’s being buffeted by the wind.

this is all placed inside a blueprint which also contains a cube that detects the player and can disable and enable to rain as and when the player is near, to save on performance.

i would have liked to have the video in this post after this image because y’know, spoiler alert, but unfortunately that’s not a thing.

but here’s the lightning i produced. it’s based off of the beam data example in the content examples particle effects level, but obviously switched up to fit my needs better. when added into a blueprint which adds the noise emitter and a thunder sound, as well as adding in a couple of clouds, it makes a pretty nice effect.

as the level progressed, i felt like i should have a look at the colours before everything went to far and it looked weird. this helped me to kind of better understand what the final image will look like.

so i did some colour correction with a colour lookup table. this essentially consists of taking a screenshot and pasting it into photoshop along with the lookup table that can be found online (that crazy colourful squarey thing in the corner) and then using adjustment layers to make it look right. you then export the colourful squarey thing back out with all the colour adjustments and UE4 knows what the default lookup table looks like and it calculates the differences and uses that to colour the scene. its super cool stuff, really intuitive and user friendly too which is always nice. 

so i found a really cool feature in zbrush. i mean, i knew that there was a normal map looking material, but i never really thought about how it would be useful. turns out though if you sculpt on a plane (or in this case a cube but that’s effectively two planes) you can just apply this material and then capture a normal map directly from the document which, as it happens, is super useful!

i designed the corner tile based off of this image 

after exporting the normal map out from zbrush, i took the model into quixel to add some textures. you can see from the fact there are two parts to this diffuse here that the model is double sided, same as the steps, to make it a bit more diverse. there were numerous attempts are more colourful diffuses, but in the end i kept it pretty monotone looking to make it a little bit more realistic of the paints available in the sort of time zone it’s supposed to be set in.

i wanted to produce the floors here in a super modular fashion so that i could basically randomise it from just a few different pieces. i decided to go with a gutter to the side of the floor panel, but with a metal grate over so it was still walkable. in order to make this look right though, i needed to be able to specify the start and end, or i would just have a gutter ending into nothing. i switched up the array blueprint with this functionality, so i could set specific start and end pieces if i needed to, as well as flip them to keep the 2-sided thing i have going on with some pieces.

this is a blockout of the kind of floor i’m going for, and also a demonstration of the new array functionality. this entire floor section here is created using the array tool, with the start and end specified to the same reversible piece, and the end flipped to match up.

so basically. those old floor pieces looked like crap and i hated them. so, i made some new ones. i designed them base off of this image, which was actually from the same album as the corner one.

i essentially cut it in half to make different sections that could tile together to make an infinitely long corridor with different length ‘chunks’ and different colours.

i wanted to show off what is essentially the finished (for now) cell. you can see i’ve made a start on the wall decorations with the chain links, and then i’ve utilised the spline mesh blueprint with the chain itself. the cell is in a juxtaposition with the actual corridor in terms of textures and colours, in that it’s much more bland, its essentially all grey. i decided to do this because it’s a prison cell, and y’know, prison cells are boring and bland. so this equates to what is essentially just a concrete room. 

since i got accepted into expotees, i was looking at the past brochures from previous years to get a feel for the paragraph of text about my project i needed to write. instead of paying much attention to that, though, i noticed a couple of people had mentioned that they had used a program called 'knald' in their projects, so i thought i would check it out.

oh man, it's pretty amazing it has to be said. i found this (relatively low resolution) texture on CGTextures just to try it out, and the result ended up being so impressive I decided to use it in my level.

so on importing the texture into knald, you're given a bunch of options which let you adjust the amount of detail in the normal map, which it is generating on the fly. this thing is basically crazybump on steroids. it then generates the other maps i need, such as height/displacement and ambient occlusion. all while giving me a handy real time DX11 view of a 3D object with the texture applied where i can see things like displacement.

so then since my original texture was quite low resolution, i can take this newly generated normal map into Quixel suite with all the other maps it generated too in order to rebuild the albedo from scratch based on the topography

and this is the finished texture, from original source material to multi layered, multi mapped, tileable texture in literally about 5 minutes. 

i noticed my level was running a little sluggishly. this might not be much of a concern for a static environment presentation piece, but for my purposes, i need a steady framerate of at least 60fps, preferably 75. so when i was getting under 30 i realised something was wrong.

thanks to the built in profiler in unreal engine, i was able to narrow down my search area to dynamic lighting. this was strange because i only have a few lights in my scene so far, and they are all static lights.

after having a look at the lightmap density view i noticed that all of my blueprints were yellow, and had no lightmap coordinates. this was troubling, since the staircase blueprint from the previous blog post generates a huge amount of geometry.

i did some more research online, and i found some obscure forum which said something about movable vs static objects.

BINGO!

turns out, when you create a static mesh in blueprints, by default it is set to moveable, which basically meant i had 100+ dynamic objects in my scene, all needing dynamic lighting.

quite the improvement.

as well as fixing the lightmap issue, since my view distance in the level is so shockinly low, it was a prime candidate for culling. i was actually planning on doing this if i had time, but the way i thought of was much more convoluted and less efficient and time consuming since i was going to detect distances and such within blueprints and kill off the actor and spawn it in at points like that. that meant i would have to have every object as a blueprint though.

but then i found the cull distance volume, which basically does everything i need and more, and much much much more efficiently than i could ever hope for.

basically, i wanted to create some stairs, but i didn't want to go through the effort of placing each block manually. plus when i first made the stairs i didn't have all the blocks ready so i would have had to go through and manually switch out blocks and change rotations etc. in essence, all things i really could not be bothered to do.

so i made a blueprint to do it for me. it is essentially a recreation of the 'array' tool in 3ds max, but with editable parameters. it also lets me stick in a bunch of meshes and it will pick random ones from that. if i'm not happy with how random it is, i just play with the seed until i am.

when i created the steps for the spiral tower, i made them in such a way that if you flipped them over they would be a new type of step, so the second branch of the blueprint here does just that. since they are wedge shaped though, they don't translate well to straight stairs, so i left in the option to disable them.