Level Assembly and Lighting 1612

This month we learned more about Unreal Engine 4 and Substance Designer 2.  Each week we worked on a different project focusing on a specific subject. For week 1 we created our own materials using Substance Designer 2, then imported them into Unreal to assemble our building.  We also created an emissive material for the lamps and a material instance to control the light color and brightness on individual lamps.

The following week we created an environment completely inside of Unreal Engine 4 using foliage assets from the Unreal Engine Forums.  For this project I also used a height map from the Terrain.party website to create my landscape. The requirements for this project were to create a sky dome blueprint, landscape material like sand and grass, a foliage material for the trees, shrubs, and grass, as well as a procedural foliage spawner (to populate the trees and shrubs), and to use the foliage placement paintbrush for the grass.  We also had to create a path for our character to follow where he did not get stuck on the landscape or meshes. To accomplish this I used Unreal Engine 4 and followed my class notes and podcasts provided.

Week 3 was about lighting. We were given assets and told to match a reference picture. We used Maya to create custom lightmap UVs for each object then imported them into Unreal. Inside the engine we arranged the meshes to match the reference, created a Lightmass Importance Volume, Post Process Volume, and placed Sphere Reflection Capture nodes in our scene.  We made sure to turn off auto exposure in our post process volume and project settings so that we could have stable lighting throughout the project. After the scene was set up I placed point lights to match the reference and changed their settings to match the reference as closely as possible. I also created an emissive material for the lamps so the light source would match the emitted light. To do this I created a material instance of the emissive material so that I could easily chance the color of different lamps.  When I was finished with the lights I also adjusted the lightmap resolution of each mesh to optimize the scene's lightmap density, then built the level.

          Reference:

        Finished Project:

For week 4 we had to create water and fire using particles inside of Unreal Engine.  For the water I created a plane in Maya which we UVed and imported into the engine. For the water's normal map I created a tileable texture in Photoshop then used CrazyBump to turn it into a normal map. Inside Unreal I created a new material for the water using the normal map I created.  For the fire we were required to have one emitter with two modules, one for the fire and one for embers or sparks. For the fire we also created custom masks using Photoshop as a targa image with each mask in one of the image's RGB channels. Using this mask I created the materials for both the fire and ember particles. Each module inside the emitter has its own settings and parameters that can be changed independently from one another.

Overall I learned a lot about Unreal Engine 4 and I am much more comfortable working with it now. I hope to learn even more about building levels, landscapes, lighting, and particles in the future so that I can keep improving.  I really enjoyed this class and had a very fun month learning new things.