DMUGA Week 16 - So many assets... + Blueprints amaze me!

This week we have lots in store including making blueprints, beginning to texture, a presentation, and some extra fun parts! This includes my mediocre attempt at a sandstorm particle effect!

As the title suggests, I got to look into how to do some blueprints in UE4 in a bit more depth than I have done before. Last week I got the ladder working well, but there were a few more things we wanted to include which are quite simple and easy to do e.g. spawning after death, sprinting & crouching. In order to do these I got help from Chris - A student on my course. I'm slowly getting into the swing of blueprints and what you need in order to do certain actions, but it still confuses me a little.

Crouch, Sprint & Torch

Container Blueprints

We have a lot of different blueprints of the containers because it means we can easily switch between the ones we want in a couple of seconds instead of having to re-build them in pieces, plus, we can make individually unique containers by having some with doors open at different angles and with different side panels/doors. - EDIT: This is not the best way to do this as it's pretty expensive - just stick with separate static meshes and groupings!!!

I also did some more modelling/unwrapping (including light maps) for the rest of the day.

Tuesday's Life drawing was generally ok, although I didn't use a fine-liner or watercolours like I was going to. I'm weakest when it comes to colour, so I wanted to slowly start to incorporate colours into my drawings. Next week I'll definitely do fine-liner for the quick 2min-15min poses, and watercolours for the longest one.
That doesn't mean we weren't posed with a challenge, as this time the model had draping fabric which was very shiny but see-through so it was quite hard to interpret it.

We also got some helpful feedback from the tutors in general, and some advice on how to separate out the texture budget as this is something which can be a hard thing to do when there is so many assets already made and that need to be made - They need to be divided onto the sheets and assigned so that we know what is possible to do with the 10 1024x1024 sheets.

I managed to get the gate modelled, re-arranged some parts of the layout again, and the textures made for the two types of wire meshes + barbed wire.

In addition, I made some modular pipe pieces so we can make any system we want which still matches with the dimensions of the containers:

Wednesday was a good day because not only did we get a lot of work done, we had a visit from the CEO of Skylands - A voxel based game which is like a vamped up minecraft mixed with Zelda/other games to create a stylised, adventure game which is procedurally generated to keep it interesting all the time. Not going to lie, the presentation made we want to try it out!

Anyway, I got down to modelling some more assets like the weapons we wanted to include from the film "Shaun of the Dead". We wanted to include these in there as an easter egg just for a bit of fun for the player:

We also have a cricket bat - will group them together in the level with a note for Shaun next to them

I also made some separate panels with cuts in them so we can use them to vary the assets of the game engine. By doing this it allowed us to properly map out the player's route and walk through most of the level so we could get a feel for what it is like to run through it. In addition to this, I felt like we needed some audio of strong wind and some kind of deep rumbling when the player reached the pit, just to add to the experience some more.

The only thing which needs to be done before we can get through the whole level is the blueprint for the gate/switch box, but Andy was already cracking down on that and trying to find out how to get it working.
I also looked into how to get a night sky as we thought it would be nice to have harsh lighting of some floodlights beaming down into the level. However, I couldn't get it looking how we wanted to, so the next day, I looked into getting a sandstorm effect as opposed to a night setting.

Presentation feedback = Was a lot better than I expected, the only trouble is the scope of the project and whether or not we'd have enough time to finish it and get it looking nice. I think we can do it, but we really do need to get the texturing done so we can have half a week for polishing & populating the world.

I spent some time creating the dust particles and 'cloud' particles, trying to get the right look for them both to make it seem like you are travelling through a sandstorm. I have to admit, it looks pretty nice, but I want to add more to it e.g. some whirling & whispy swooping action - it's ok in the mean time though.

I also got a couple of different fire particle effects working. I produced two because the first one I made wasn't that great because you could see the panning texture, so I was ok but not too happy with the result. I found a second tutorial on how to make fire, and it looked great! It was around 3 hours of work, and it took me a lot longer due to some audio lag, but the tutorial is really good and I highly suggest anyone to use it (For both UDK AND UE4 as 98% of it is transferrable!):

1st Attempt

2nd Attempt - Imbue FX Tutorial

Fire in unreal engine - Imbue FX

Speaking of tutorials, I also had a look into vertex painting because I have been meaning to get into it for so long because of how good it can be, but not got around to doing it, but I feel like I desperately need it now due to the variation in textures that we require. So here is the tutorial I followed and it's very basic, but very helpful too:

Vertex Painting Tutorial

To round it all off, I did 3 bits of tarpaulin so we can use them in the living area of our map, and some texturing work.
So overall, a good week for work as we got a lot done, but there is still so much to do and time is running out... Not to mention a very large problem we still have from the first week which is the light bleeding through into the containers: