Objective: Learn How to Work Within a Game Engine
Areas of Focus: Texturing, Modeling, BluePrint Software: Unreal Engine 4, Maya, Houdini, Substance Painter, Substance Designer, Z Brush |
Contributors:
Katie Cottrell (self) Alicia Street North Cook |
Overview: Eropa's Dryad is a project designed to help us get accustomed to creating game ready assets and working within a game engine. It was a new experience for the whole team since we had only been working in an animation pipeline up until this point.
Development
Concept Art: We had a long list of animals and locations we wanted to include in our game but we had to scale down the list to make sure we could finish the project on time. North drew up most of the creature concepts but I drew a couple too. (pictured on the right). I also drew up our environment concept art.
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Test Map: This was a small scale scene of what the finished landscape was meant to look like. It’s not pretty but it was meant to be a proof of concept rather than a polished piece. Unreal Engine looks scary on the surface, and has an overwhelming user interface, but the program becomes intuitive very fast. I think I learned more about what not to do since I come from a 3D film making background and the 3D game pipeline is vastly different.
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Getting the Game to Work
Third Person Character: Blueprint was game changing because it allowed more right brained people like me to being writing basic scrips for our game. But the learning curve was steeper than I imagined. Most of what I learned came directly from tutorials. Regardless, it made our game playable which was very rewarding!
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Breaking up the Map: Loading in the entire heightfeild made the performance drag before we placed any assets or textures. I learned world editor and broke the map up into tiles which made the performance smooth again since it would only load tiles that the player was around.
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Asset Production
Terrain: This was the first official asset I got to make for our game. North drew up an idea for what our map layout was going to look like and I got to work. We decided to make our game take place in a crater since it creates a natural barrier to keep the players contained in. I created the terrain using Houdini which allowed me to create the landscape procedural instead having to hand sculpt it. The map was textured by me using substance designer materials I made. I used the Unreal landscape painting function to add the texture to our final map.
Concept Art by North Cook
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Final Map
Putting It Together: It was fun to see all of our assets in one scene for the first time. Learning about how to get them to render out with correct lighting and material settings was hard at first but it wasn't difficult to get used to. For example, unreal likes to automatically display a lot of preset post processing settings, which I didn't know even existed, but after I learned about them I was able to get the scene to look correct.
Before this project I attempted to make a scene in Unity and I struggled to make a small interior with fairly simple meshes. Many of the assets ended up with solid colored shaders and I didn't even touch the game play or lighting. This project was much more ambitious with in depth asset pipelines and actual game play abilities. Overall it was major improvement and a worthwhile project. |
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Tree assets by North Cook, Small Rock assets by North Cook and Alicia Street, Water shader by Adam Homoki (on the Unreal Asset Store)
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