#rt3dcg

This assignment was a combination of the while semester’s project work, making a environment from an image while exploring the Unreal4 real-time engine. This semester really steered me in refining my asset creation pipeline and confidence with Maya, Photoshop and introduced Unreal as an interesting and useful game engine. The first thing I wanted to do when I finished this level was to create a sledding game and I’m confident that, even though I don’t know all the processes required to create this, I can find it out through looking at online resources and at Unreal documentation entries.

This semester has been a struggle, to manage time between my animation subjects and the final game project, this has impacted on the amount of work I could get finished within the time frame. There is so much more I would have liked to implement and refine but hope this is a good showing of my work and I feel that this satisfies the assignment requirements. Thank you for reading and all the best till next time!

With time running low, I needed to round out my scene and bring it closer to original concept art. So I created some more large scale unique props for the scene.

Sled - This object is I little bit sloppy, I would have preferred to have all the wooden elements, one solid mesh but this worked out fine I used the wood texture of the table and tinted it dark, then I painted the red strip on the lower fifth of the image, to cover the metal sled base.

Bookshelf - Having learnt my lesson from the footlocker mesh, this time I lined up the edges the extruded the center faces inwards. The UV mesh looks messy because I wanted to reuse the floor plank texture for this, so I needed to have everything overlapping so the boards would be a a good scale in the final image.

Now that the lighting and the character is looking good, I can move onto creating more props for the scene. The most important item, first on the list was the lantern.  I’m really happy with how the lantern turned out, the mesh was easily spit up into 3 cylinders, I counted out the edges needed and soon had the shape done, from here I extruded 6 faces and turned them into the support frame, using similar method, created the wire handle, then deleted half the faces and mirrored it over sewed it together and was done. Next was the UV unwraping, I’ve found the quickest way is to select the vertical edge-loops on the model (except the loop where the seam is going to be) and move-sew them together in the editor with one click, then sew the strips together from the straightest edge (while unfolding the mesh whenever it gets messy). The whole process took 2 and a half hours, I can tell I have definitely improved from the start of the term, where it took more than 8 hours to model and unwrap a barrel.

Anyway back to the task, all the processes I learnt from creating the opacity and emissive nodes on the light shaft, came in handy making the lantern, but it was a bit more finicky this time, as i had to have a opacity mask, an emissive mask and I wanted to have the ‘flame’ of the lantern glow orange.

With the lantern finished, I could bring it into the scene and attach the lantern light to it. I tried to find information on how to make an object only not cast shadows from one light, but I couldn’t find anything. (I wanted to have a second lantern light that would cast shadows on everything but the lantern so that the shadows on the walls/floor wouldn't be as dark)

With the lights attached to the lamp, I added collision physics to the lamp so that if the player bumps it, it will swing on the beam, or get knocked down. At the moment the slightest nudge sends the lantern flying, if i have time, I’ll look into making the physics not as harsh.

I looked into the emissive panels and found out its 5 point lights arranged in a grid and its good at creating really diffused lighting but for this project just a spotlight with a hot-spot is enough lighting spread. With the spot lights lined up, I turned to the trusty internet on how to make a light have a visible beam, I found that Unreal’s directional light has a light shaft option but you can only see it when you are facing the light source, not quite what I was looking for.

Also I found a great tutorial on making light shafts with transparent objects that really expanded my knowledge of the material editor.

Here’s the rundown of the process of making the light shafts

- I made a pyramid, made it transparent, positioned one for each side of the window for both the spotlight and the ambient light outside. 

-Created an opacity mask that fades to black with noise so that it looks like dust particles, increased its pixel depth (so when walking though, it doesn’t show just single planes of light)

- Blended in a depth fade so that if the beam touches an object it doesn't pierce through it, it fades away as it approaches then fades back in after passing it.

- Made the object emit a low level of light, so it looks like the particles are dispersing the light.

The other thing I wanted to try with the lights is to have the lantern’s light change intensity to make the scene more lively, after a little research I found out about the timeline function in the level blueprint. This allows you to change values over time, just what I was looking for!

As shown in the red graph, the intensity of the light goes up and down over a period of 4 seconds.

The assignment requires us to set up character and movement mechanics with animations for each, we were given a link to ‘Mixamo’ website as an option for the character animations. They advertise a lot of free rigging tools and even a character creator, great! even if its a bit generic looking its better than a bright blue mannequin (from the animation-starter-pack in the Unreal store for free). I logged in, confirmed my email address and everything but for some reason it wouldn't let me download the character creator program, not wanting it to degenerate into another multiple hour long saga, like last time, I guess the starter kit would have to do. (The first thing I did when I had the chance was to change to color to something less eye-wrenching)

I am extremely intimidated by the process of setting up character animations so I immediately turned to the Unreal documentation for the step by step process (awfully nice of them for making this). At first it was very difficult to understand the blueprint scripting and find all the parts of the graph.

Setting up the Movement blueprint script.

I needed to stop and step through each part of the graph and slowly I was able to get the Lingo. The real test on if I understand is when I try to create my slide mechanic, I understand the basics of calling up variables, comparing and assigning new values, but at this stage I will need to completely map out any new mechanics I want to implement before touching the blueprint graph.

Setting up blend spaces.

I had seen images of this before and had no idea what it meant, but having it explained step by step, its fairly simple - set the max speed of blend space, then place the animations on the grid so that opposite directions don’t touch. From here you create the animation state machine, which is just a flow chart of the animations with rules that allow moving from one state to the next. (rules are usually - when button press = true - when speed = ( or not =) zero)

Creating Slide Mechanic The first thing I did was to add animations to the state machine flow, because I don’t have the original file, I cant create new animations, so I’m just reusing the prone idle and prone-to-stand. Unfortunately there is no prone-to-crouch set, I thought that you could just play the first half of the animation (stopping at a crouched position to easily blend to a crouch) like you can do in unity, but it seems you cant split animations, you need to re-export them at a different length.

Next was blueprint scripting the mechanic onto the character. The plan was to have the slide behave like this: - hold space to slide, releasing space stops sliding and stands up fairly simple, created a release option for the space bar the resets everything - cant change directions while sliding at start of slide, disable movement, also created a variable to disable turning - speed boost at start, slowly comes to a stop This was a bit difficult, at first I tried having the slide behave like a jump, goes up into the air then falls on the ground with the prone animation but this didn’t work, the character would barely hop. Then i tried just increasing the movement speed to have it slow to a stop, I could get the first part but had to turn to the internet to find out how to make the character decelerate. I could only find some convoluted way of increasing the friction over a timeline or something, but this gave me an idea, why not have an initial force push the character and lower the friction temporarily so the character slides to a slow stop. I would show the graph but its fairly long and you wouldn't be able to read it when it’s shrunk that small but here is the run down in words. event-on-jump -> if crouched = true -> set character-max-speed to zero -> make ground friction 1/40 strength -> Launch character at current direction at current speed times 7 ->  disable turning event-on-release -> set character-max-speed to (crouch speed) -> make ground friction 40 times strength -> disable character movement for half a second (while standing up) -> re-enable movement -> re-enable turning So by the end we have - Idle (no input) - Walk (wasd) - Run (hold left shift) - Crouch (toggle left ctrl) - Turn (mouse movement) - Jump (space-bar) - Slide/dive (ctrl toggle on + space bar)