Tech – Week Eight
This week I have been continuing my work on the Spline tool from last week. The major addition I have added to the tool from last week is the ability to have end meshes that cap either end of the spline. These meshes are orientated outwards from the spline matching the direction in which the end tangents are facing. As well as changing which mesh is used either end you can also tweak the rotation of the meshes to best suit the situation you are using them for. It was relatively easy to implement the addition of the meshes at the end of the spline as I have previously worked on adding meshes in relation to tangents but getting them to rotate in correct direction and match the rotation as well as the location of the tangent proved to be more difficult that I had anticipated when I set out adding this functionality.
While I’m on the topic of rotation I have also made some changes to the way you can set the rotation of the equally spaced meshes. I’m now using an enumerator which gives a drop down menu for different orientation types of the equally spaced meshes. After Kit asked to be able to have random rotation on the meshes I added it as one of the options, alongside the ‘orientate to spline’ and ‘0, 0, 0’ rotation options. The randomness of the rotation is driven by a stream or seed that can be changed to give different outcomes, or kept the same if you wanted the same rotation across multiple instances of the blueprint.
Another thing I have added this week from Kit’s request is the ability to change the spacing between meshes. We found that with the continuously placed meshes, as the size of the mesh is determined by its bounds, it sometimes left gaps between each mesh, which is less than ideal. You can now reduce that spacing via an exposed variable, however it does course minor stretching to the mesh. This is something I am hoping to change later on so you don’t have any stretching but it works as a way to fix the spacing issue for now.
Like I mentioned at the end of last week’s update I have added the same ability to change material parameters on meshes used by the tool that is in the ‘Modular Building Tool’.
Going back to the previous work I had done for the materials pack. I realised that the vertex paint master material was great if all you wanted to do was paint 4 different materials but was restricting to anyone that wanted add more functionality to the shaders they were making. To counter this I have made a series of material functions that make it easy for the user to quickly setup the same functionally that the master material gives but within their own shaders.
In the upcoming weeks I am going to be continuing to work with material functions, as well as revisiting some of the shaders I have produced, most importantly the ocean water, to further optimise them and fix any visual errors that we’ve encountered while using them.
As well as this it’s time to move onto the final tool, the ‘random asset location tool’. This is going to be my primary focus for the next couple of weeks. Similarly to how I have worked on the previous two I will be taking the prototype made in the first week of the project and adding the functionality we have already planned as well as any that we feel is needed after testing.
