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Fire
The other day, I managed to break the fire system I had in place. The fire originally came from the starter content in Unreal. I had somehow managed to turn off the flames and the only thing visible are the embers now...which doesn't help the player navigate the environment much. I lost all light from the broken flame as well. This is shown in the image below.
Luckily I remembered reading months ago about Epic releasing free asset packs on Unreal based from their game, Infinity Blade. This has turned out to be a blessing for me, not only have I been able to get a new fire...but it's also better than the old one that I broke. The old one was really erratic and the flames were all over the place but this new one behaves a lot better. Below is the Unreal marketplace page for the Infinity Blade: Effects pack. These are completely free for me to use, I only used the one fire particle though.
This is the asset pack in my "Vault". All I had to do was add it to my project.
This is the Infinity Blade assets in my content browser.
This is the fire that I selected in the content browser, it's highlighted in yellow.
This is the Infinity Blade fire. The problem I had was that it didn't emit any light to begin with, which wasn't very useful for going around my cave. I had to add my own "Light" value to it to make it emit light and this worked perfect for me.
This is my flame with my torch stick. I was able to actually replace my torch with the default gun from the first person starter level from Unreal. This allowed me to use the code that was on the gun to make it look like it it was being held by the player. I wasn't sure what would happen if I deleted the actual gun so I just turned its visibility off.
This model below is an updated model of the torch, I extruded out the top polygons to mimic the sort of bulged top of torches where cloth/straw has been wrapped around to catch the flame. This modification alone wasn't enough so I moved the polygons around to get a more natural look.
This is the construction script that was on the gun to attach it to the player mesh and make it move more realistically with the player. I just replaced the Gun with my Torch, I also changed a few settings so the torch wasn't bound to the mesh so I could move it more freely.
This is the beginning of my cave in the Unreal view-port.
I have placed a skylight in the scene so you can see what is going on. Here you can see my player mesh with the torch hovering in front of them. This is also the start of my cave...as you can see I didn't have the time to spend making the start of it look believable. I was fighting too much with Unreal with getting decals workings and getting the textures looking good as well.
One issue I had (image below) when placing the torch in my scene was that it was being affected by my decals, this was easily fixed though shown in the image below.
Inside the player mesh, I selected the torch and searched "Decal" on the right side of the window and un-ticked "receive decals".
This is my final level and is the outside of where my video capture is shot from.
Here I removed the sleeve if you like, to reveal the actual level. The reason I have made the cover for my whole level is obviously to stop any light from getting into the cave when I build the lights. I'm sure there is a way of lighting up the scene so you can work in it but with out the light being built with the rest of the level. I, of course, don't know how to do that. although, I could have maybe just used the unlit setting but I never knew about that until about two weeks from the end.
This is just the above state of the scene from a different angle. You can see here that I have a floor and a ceiling with the meshes making up the walls in-between (clever right?). The things coming out from the the ceiling make more sense with an image further down.
Here the cieling has been moved up to reveal the level a bit better. The ceiling it literally just the floor duplicated and moved up.
My floor was originally one big plane but the texture for it was pixelated when applied to the plane itself in Unreal. So I made the plane smaller in Maya and tiled it in Unreal and it worked out better.
This is my scene again with a skylight so you can see better. Here the ceiling is moved up and you can see the boulders dominating the scene.
This is my scene without the boulders, you can clearly see the walls making up my cave. The problem I had was that I just couldn't make my modular walls work in Unreal. I could have modeled corners but it just didn't seem like that would work either. On top of this, my lack of experience... and ability with Unreal made things really difficult and my modular wall (which was proven in Maya) just didn't work in Unreal. I couldn't position them in the right way which is why I had to make my whole scene in Maya and export each piece on its own, and if I wanted to make any changes I had to make the change in Maya and re-import the FBX in Unreal. So because of this problem with seams with my models I just made my whole cave in Maya and made a boulder which I duplicated and rotated to make the cave look more random but to also try and hide flickering edges where two pieces of wall meet.
Below is my scene with the collisions visible on the walls.
This image below shows an audio trigger. The outer circle shows the furthest extent of the audio. This is for a wind effect.
This is another sound trigger for my whole scene. By doing the main soundtrack as an audio trigger, it gives more depth to it as the audio fluctuates in loudness as the player moves further away and then closer to the origin of the audio trigger.
This is another audio trigger in action.
This is a typical sort of seam in my modelling that I mentioned earlier in this post.
...and this is how I dealt with it throughout my whole level. I felt that the seam of a boulder intersecting the wall looked better than the two planes of walls intersecting...which caused some flickering in some cases.
This image below is showing my decal. I had some issues with my decals.
I couldn't see some of my decals on the walls which made it difficult to position them properly.
The problem for some reason was that the decals didn't show in shadowed areas.
So I had to position lights in my scene next to the certain decals that weren't showing just so I could scale them and position them properly. (note: this is a reconstruction of the problem, in the original issue the decals literally didn't show on the wall in certain areas and I had several of these lights around my cave so I could see what I was doing).
This is all the audio in my level.
I got the audio from http://incompetech.com/ and http://soundbible.com/ respectively.
This image below is showing one of my audio blueprints. All my audio triggers look like this.
This is my horn asset in the content browser.
...and this is my paint pot in the content browser.
This screenshot below shows my extra assets in the game with the game lighting conditions from the torch.
This is my spear in the content browser.
And this is the spear again, in the game with proper lighting conditions.
Decal number one in contents browser, down the left of the image you can see each folder has the same set up as this but with the next part of the cave story. There are about 31 separate decals.
Final decal in game with lighting
Summary
Overall in this module, I have been fighting with Unreal from the start and I have struggled modelling for games. I perhaps spent too much time getting the modular walls working (of which I never utilized anyway).
In terms of my intentions for this module, I wanted to create a narrative in my level that could be interpreted in another way than the one I intended and the cave story idea worked itself perfectly for that. Anyone can interpret the images in their own way.
I feel I have done really well to actually get something like this on this module, learning Unreal hasn't been fun and modelling assets for games has also been a challenge. My interests lie in the narrative side of games/animation/film so I tried to focus as much on the narrative...but also environmental storytelling. The combination of audio and visuals has been a key element with the audio guiding the player in key elements of the cave narrative.
I also want to mention why I chose Unreal for this module, I chose it because my Professional Projects team have been using Unreal. I have been able to transfer some minor skills from Unreal that I have picked up from this module over to my group project, skills mainly revolving around modelling for games. This has gone both ways as well. I'm not really sure if my strengths lie more in 3D or 2D but I am more comfortable in 3D at the moment......for animations purposes more so though. I really haven't enjoyed the experience of working with Maya to Unreal but I have actually enjoyed the module a little bit more based on the knowledge I have gained overall for making assets for games.
Below are links to my video capture of my level in Unreal.
Youtube:
Vimeo:
