BA2A - Week 3

Week 3 Summary

Building the World

With the Inventory system partly done (Will update the graphics at a later state) it was time to build the world itself. To do this I decided to use a software called "World Machine". The reason I choose this piece of software was because I have had earlier experience with it by creating a world for Cryengine a while back. It is a very quick tool where you can make a world in just a few minutes to later bring into Unreal and texture. Texturing it will be a rather easy process because most of it is just Snow and snowy mountains. 

Since it was a while I used World Machine I watched a tutorial to refresh my mind and also to teach me how to correctly implement the world into Unreal Engine.

Here is the tutorial I followed: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K9WTKK9f1b8

My world created in World Machine

When my world was done it was time to implement it into Unreal engine, this was a very easy process of extracting a Height Map from World Machine and bring it into Unreal Engine's terrain tool.

Image of the terrain just being imported into Unreal

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Terrain in engine without texture work

Now is was time to texture the world. I started off by using different snow textures I found in the free asset pack on the store by Epic Game's "Infinityblade" game but to later replace it with my own texture because I wasn't pleased with the one provided in the package.

The world before texture paint

The world after texture paint

Top down view of the world,

The trees I used for the prototype were also provided by the Infinity blade asset pack, however I did have to do some tweaking to the LOD's but that was an easy fix. 

Now it was time to add some weather effects, again taken from the Infinity blade asset pack which had all the kinds of particles I needed which was perfect for a arctic environment! Some were also taken from the Epic Game particle effects cave demo!

I also experimented with grass in the environment, in the end I decided not to with so much grass because it looks rather odd in a heavily snowy environment where the grass would technically be buried underneath the snow. Also it is a lot more performance heavy to have scenes with lots of grass.

Player Movement and Immersion

Another part I started to touch on this week was the player movement, since the focus of this brief was "Flow" I think the player movement is very important. I found plenty of tutorials all from head bobbing to footstep sounds. I also added ambient sounds to make the player more immersed into the environment.