Week One

Obstacle Course

Overview

Physics

In the obstacle course, we were required to include something containing  physics. For  my course, I included a ball roll and a cube push to get onto the course. Week Two

Creating Textures

Learning the nodes

During the introduction to the class, we learned about what each node on this screen does. This allowed us to replicate the process another four times to memorise how to make textures in Unreal.

Making Denim

Creating a new material instance to change the pigment of the texture

Denim Sphere
Repeating the Process

Brick

Concrete TileCorrugated IronWooden FlooringFinal Display Wall
Combining Materials to Make Rust

In order to achieve this effect, I combined the Corrugated Iron texture from before with a Rust texture, dividing the value of the Corrugated Iron so that it was less prevalent in the final texture. This allows the rust to stand out more and give it more of a faded look.

Week Six

Blueprints

Colour Changing Light

For the first task today, we made this green light (Shown on the right of this image) change colours by creating, then entering, a trigger area. (Shown on the left of this image).

Once stepping into the space shown above, the light changes colour to red. If I then step back out, the right will change back to green.Shown above are the blueprints used to create this effect. Below will be an explanation of what is happening in this image, using the top line as an example. The bottom line is essentially just undoing what the top line has done.

These red Event blueprints will be hence forth referred to as the figurative “box” that we are putting everything in to. The screenshot above references the blueprint at the top of the original screenshot. This one creates our “box,” (Turning the light red) the other one at the bottom will be what takes everything out of our “box” (Turning the light back to green).

All of the blueprints without a beginning node, such as the one above (Actor type) – or the deeper blue ones (Linear Colour type) titled “New Light Color”, are Variables. These are items to be placed into the “box.”

What this blueprint does is append what we’re about to do to every PointLight in the world. Essentially, it is applying everything in the “box” to every PointLight in the world.

These two together will collect information on what colour the light currently is before stepping into the trigger.

This blueprint then takes all of that information, stores it, then applies the red colour to the light. In other words, it sets the “box” aside and waits for the player to leave the trigger.

The bottom line, shown above, then changes the colour of the light back to green once they leave the trigger area. Or, in box terms, it dumps everything out of the figurative “box.”

If you want to make the trigger happen only once (The light turns red and stays red permanently), you can add this sequence into the blueprint.

By adding this in to the sequence like so, this will add a condition to the trigger box that only allows it to be triggered on a single time, essentially freezing it after it gets initially triggered.

Rotating Cube

Next up is to make this cube spin. This is fairly simple and isn’t nearly as complicated at the light trigger.

Before doing anything, the cube must be set from Static to Movable. Otherwise, the cube won’t move at all.

This is the blueprint tree, you can still apply the box method to this, but I’m not going to try and explain it like that again.

The red “Event Tick” blueprint will update every tick during game time (Really fast).

The green “Get World Rotation” blueprint notes down the rotation values of the cube every time this tree updates (which is every tick due to the red event blueprint from before). This blueprint is connected to a variable which then connects all of this back to the cube from the first image.

The second green blueprint “Combine Rotators” then compiles this information with a new variable that allows the user to input a value for the computer to add to the rotation of the cube. Example of the user input below. I cranked it to 1000 to launch the player, but it is extremely overkill.

This information is then sent to the blue “Set World Rotation” blueprint, which then applies this information to the cube every tick.

Week Seven

Water Material

In today’s class we created some simple water textures.

This is simple once you understand it.

These first two parameters connect to the water normal textures. These are not colours. As they are float parameters, they are automatically converted to the V3 format (X, Y, Z). What these parameters actually do is adjust the speed of the water, you just ignore the Z axis on the parameter then adjust the X and Y to what you need – 0 being still and 1 being incredibly fast.

As stated before, those parameters connect to the normals through this Panner blueprint. This just tells the normals that the V3 from before is there to adjust speed.

This is the only other complicated thing on the blueprint tree. All it does is adjust the colour that the water will absorb. As it is set to red, you will see no red in the water.

As stated before, the float values are all Parameters. This means we can create material instances and edit them whenever we need to create wonderful new colours for the water.

Here is an example where I created green water, shown in game below.

Toon Shading

Next up is a toon shader. This is also pretty quick to create. All it does it flatten down the colour shading to two states, on and off. This gives off the cartoony look that games such as Hi-Fi Rush are known for.

This is the blueprint tree for the toon shader. The top line grabs the sky box colour, so that the sky will stay the same and not be affected by the shader. The bottom line is explained by my teacher better, so here we go:

Week Eight

Particle Effects

End of Semester Project

Landscape material Snow solutionAnimating waterSand solutionTerrainBuilding and lightsMaking fire-like flickers in the lightLantern positioning

 

Light testFoliage

Ground noise to weather down path

Water animation

I’m happy with how this came out, maybe it wasn’t worth making the lake as you can’t see it in the video but it’s good to at least practice making water again.

My main issue with this project is that the shadows are incredibly glitchy. Looked up some solutions and they didn’t work for me.

The assets are not made by me. As it was not a requirement – due to this not being a modelling class, I decided to use pre built assets to instead focus on using the UE5 blueprints and terrain tools that we were learning in class.