Building the World
For making the game level we had to tackle a few challenges. We had to effectively plan out what we needed, how to make it and how to play with it in Unreal Engine. We first of tackled making the game assets. This meant we focused on using maya to model our assets. To do this the whole team participated and worked together to achieve this outcome, first off we all had a meeting and worked on making sure everyone understood how to model. James was very good at this he modeled some great assets for the game. But we all started off modeling a crate. We all started getting used to Maya and understanding the modeling process. We had to keep somethings in mind. These we the poly counts, because the higher the poly count the harder the game will be to run on computers. Then we had to take into count was UV unwrapping which at time was a nightmare. But Zaynah and James got a very basic understanding of this in Maya and I showed in 3ds Max as well as I was more familiar at doing this in 3ds Max. After that we split the work Zaynah modeled a boat, a shed and little wooden dock. James modeled house, some fences and lamp post and cars. And I modeled the Picket fences, the crate asset we used in our game, and trees and grass etc. We also had used unreals default modeling tool for simple modeling like the background buildings and the house where we start.
After that we had figured out how to model and UV unwrap but now we needed to work on texturing. We had a few ways in which we could approach but we used a few methods, for the most part Zaynah and James texture using default texture from Unreal and applying it to the models which worked for our, basic models. But for some more complex ones and to get a more stylised effect on some of our assets I used a tool called Substance Painter.
This tool allows me to paint my model and add advanced materials. This allowed me to achieve multiple materials on a model, but also allowed me to use some great mask systems. This gave me the ability to great paint edge wear, or moss growth. It would do this my calculating a curvature map to determine where edges are located and how beveled those edges are. It would use World space normals which determines whats up and down on a model so you and tell it to paint a texture to simulate moss. I used this technique on these painting collectable meshes for the game and used this tool on our picket fence models to allow we to create some really interesting effects.
For the tree in the game I used a tool called speedtree in which it creates trees using procedural tools. This gave me full control over the creation of the tree but made the process fast and easy to use. Then I created a 3d model of the trees for Unreal and a 2d billboard tree. The idea behind this process was to use the 3d tree closer to the camera so the play can see the depth and use the billboard trees in the background where we cannot see the depth of the tree as much.
After all of this we now have to import our meshes into Unreal and start setting up the scene. We conceptualize the space before all of our models and then we replaced each area with its models, I focused on the forest and home, and James work on the forest a bit as well and the City. Then after that we finalised the layout as a group and got working on our puzzles.
