Tech - Week Two

Since last week a lot has happened. I have working prototypes for all the tools we are looking to produce and a better understanding on how I am going to implement the changes that need to be made.

The spline based asset placement tool does indeed place assets along a spline, but not without flaws. I’ve got it up and running so that you can input a given mesh and it takes both sides of the mesh and places it along the spline between 2 drawn tangents. This works great but it stretches the assets to fit between the tangents which isn’t ideal. I’m looking to hopefully have it so that it follows the splines path the same way it does now but then you specify how many meshes you want it to draw and it will place them one by one, one after the other along the path. That way they keep their form but still gives the user the flexibility that the tool has in its current form. Still not 100% sure how I’m going to manage this but like with all of these tools it’s going to take some further research and trial and error to get right.

The other thing I was wanting to add to this tool is the ability to use the spline to set the path to string cables with. Not just cables but also the lights or other objects which hang from them. This is going to be even more difficult and I fear may need to be a separate blueprint of its own to get working well. But the ultimate goal is to get all the spline based needs built into the one tool that does everything we need it to do.

I have got the randomised asset population tool up and working. This has been my main focus this last week and has come a long way since Monday. Not only have I got it so that you can input you’re meshes into the blueprint it will then place the given amount of them randomly within the set bounds. It has also been recently added so that you can now tweak the location of the assets after they have been placed by the blueprint, an issue I came across early when building the tool. Unfortunately since this has been added to have also managed to add a variety of bug that take away some of the other functionality, but I hope to rectify them soon.

Now I know how to make it so you can tweak the location of assets after they have been placed in by a blueprint I am going to be using this to further enhance the modular building tool I made last week. This will give us the ability to add additional meshes to the outside of the building and tweak their location; to break up the modularity of the building pieces.

Although I have some changes to make to the blueprints I have been working on the past two weeks my main focus for the next couple is going to be on materials. Both me and Kit are going to be building materials both in Substance Design and UE4 ready to start use on asset creating and fleshing out the current white-boxed level. We’ll be building the base materials in substance designer so that the materials can be used in Substance Painter later when texturing, as well as bringing them into UE4 as tileable materials to include as part of the material section of the Environment Pack.

As there is going to be two of us working on this we have split responsibility for the different materials between us. I’m not going to be making as many of the base materials as Kit but focusing my time more on the technical side of building the more elaborate shaders in UE4, the main 3 being Water, Mesh Fence and Fabric for the scaffolding. I’m hoping to implement some procedural elements to all of them to make them go further and more useable throughout the level, details of what and how haven’t been set yet so that is going to be the start of this week.

#tech #ue4 #tools #splines