Creation of obstacle course

week 2 creating texture materials

Unreal has a similar system of making materials to Maya. Below is pictures of this system with a bar of settings that link to other commands. The beginning of the lesson of week 2 was a little daunting but I got the hang of it in the end.

This week we created textures on unreal engine. Creating as many different cool looking textures as we could. The system that is used to make these textures is very similar to the one in Maya. There’s a settings bar where you can attach multiple setting changers to customise a texture. As you can see above I have some of the textures I made screen shot. You can see some of the settings are altered such as Base colour and roughness. This lesson was a little confusing at first but I got the hang of it in the end and enjoyed making the different textures.

Week 3

I had some fun using the landscape mode, creating a grass land scenery that was quite hilly.

I added some assets to create a deeper world in my project. I found that I had some rubble and broken castle stuff. I think it was a cool look. A lot of this was experimenting and trying to create ideas for my first assesment.

Week 3 was a big lesson. We learnt all the different modes that you can switch to on Unreal. Landscape, Foliage and selection are just some of the tools we were taught this week. Landscape is where we created our own mountains and shapes for the scene. Foliage is where you can download and drop assets. Selection is the default tool which is pretty self-explanatory.

Also learnt how to apply textures to the landscape. I tried making my own cabin with the modelling tool. If I’m being honest I struggled a bit. But I ended up getting the hang of some of the modelling.

Week 4 –

 

point light:

spot light:

Best way to describe spot light is a theatre light. It’s like those lights above stages that light up the actors.

 

Rect light:

The rect light is a one way light. As you can see the square is shining light in front of it. There is no light being emitted behind it. A one way light that is great for walls.

Sky light:

Sky light is exactly what it’s called. A light in the sky. Kind of act like the sun in the project. I changed the intensity slightly in the two pictures and you can see there is a major change in the project. Not just the building, the whole projects lighting is changed completely.

Directional light are suns. The add a sun effect where you can change the brightness of the project.

As you can see I ended up making a Dune inspired sand planet with a Japanese castle added to the scene. I was just doing this to create an environment to test out my lights. I wanted a lot of shadows to use the different lights on.

 

Week 5

Camera movement.

I originally recorded the task I did in class of how to use camera movement, however I accidently deleted the video. I’ve gone back to re-do the task on a project that I’m hoping will develop nicely in to my first project for CGI foundations class. This was a nice recap for camera movement. I did it all from memory first try in the video above without any help online so it’s nice to know that I remembered everything. You can set the camera to be fixed on an object which I didn’t show.

I remember this lesson was easy to follow and not really having any issues with the camera. Out of all the tools we’ve been taught such as modelling, lighting and textures this was the easiest and most fun. There is no limitations in unreal. I can clearly see how a filmmaker would be more opt to have cinematography done on computer. Especially since some camera movements that would usually be seen as impossible can be done on computer instead.

Week6 Blue prints

The blueprints lesson might have been the most confusing lesson I’ve done. I recorded a lot of the lesson above. I thought it would be good for reference. I managed to get the work done in the lesson that you can see on this recording but you can tell it took me a while to figure out.

Creating a Beach

I saw one of my classmates making cliffs over an ocean and I was confused at first because we haven’t learnt how to do that at this point in time. When I got home a searched a very quick video on how to create a beach tutorial. I recorded by screen when making the beach for future reference.

You might be able to spot me adding in rocks and ships in the back. Just to add more depth to the project. This task was done at home in my own time. It opens up my options know how to make this for the first assesment.

Week7

Below is a screen shot of the water blueprint we made. The parts on the far left help make the water flow a bit more in a non linear way.

Week 7 recording of lesson

In class we made the water blue print as well as a cartoon effect. This cartoon effect is included in the Vimeo video above this paragraph. This cartoon style would change the shadow for some of the objects in the scene.

 

Week8

Week 8 was particle manipulation. We added a bubble particle and modified the bubbles physics. I ended up making the particles look like sonic the hedgehog when he goes in to a ball.

I then added a pressure plate in the level blueprints to make the particle only show up when the player activates a pressure play block.

Week 9

I’ve started the project making a castle and some walls in a snow terrain project. If I’m being completely honest with the project idea I’m winging the whole thing. I don’t want to spend too much time coming up with a concept for my interior, exterior scene. The world that I’m making is a Hoth (Star wars) inspired scene. I made the texture material but I’m still not completely happy with the snow aesthetic. You can tell by zooming out that the snow material is just repeating. I’m planning on taking some blueprint code from the gold mat. It has some nodes to make the material more random, so it doesn’t look copied and pasted.

Another addition I plan on doing to the project is by adding snow from the sky. It would be cool to have some particles or something falling, add more to the scene.

Week 10

This lesson we looked at skeleton meshes. Meshes with bones that enable the limbs of the mesh. Using Mixamo Mixamo in class we downloaded a character, idle, walking, jumping and falling animation. We applied the downloads to our project. Adding them to our animation blue prints so we could apply them when playing the levels.

The blue prints we made would determine what animations would play out. If the character was falling then the character would be locked in a falling animation. So we had to assign numbered values to tell unreal what should play out over another situation.

Massive changes to my Project

Since the last time I edited my project there have been massive changes to my project for the interior and exterior. I have kept my theme with the Chinese buildings and snow. However I have removed the castle I was building entirely as well as changing the primary snow texture that I made. I think just these two changes were very noticeable and a way for the project to progress.

I didn’t think the castle was a great place to build my interior. It was a big hassle to use and I thought it did not fit the world I was building. I also removed a bridge that I had made over the pond. I think removing the bridge suited the world.

A small change

A small change which is not very noticeable is changing the texture of the building’s roofs. I made a snow texture for the roofs to make it look like they had snow on them.

 

Pay Less for all the Best Games with CDKeys | May 2024 (youtube.com)

The YouTube video above was a very helpful and gave me some nice assets for the build. Definitely put me in to the right direction for my idea.

project show

Issue for preview lighting

How to Remove Preview Permanently On Unreal Engine 5/UE5 (youtube.com)

I had an issue with unreal engine when filming my sequences for the assignment work. Some of the reflections emitted from the point lights left a preview text on the walls. I couldn’t have this in my sequence so I started going through videos on how to remove the text being displayed in my videos. Fixing the issue was simple, I just needed to find the blueprint and change the material to black.

Rendering my videos was another issue. Some of my videos that were 20 second long would take almost an hour to render. I made my scenes weeks ago of writing this but the renders were all I needed for the video. So my PC was doing the renders in the background of my days and I couldn’t do other work. I think this is more an issue in my PC than the engine.