Rooftop project

Probably one of the hardest projects I’ve had to do to date. Firstly because I couldn’t find motivation, secondly because I found unreal so hard to use.

When I first started work on the project it looked as though it was going to become a factory rooftop. It had been poorly imported into unreal, the texture was poor since I’d used a 1024x1024 map for the rooftop base.

As I came close to finishing the rooftop I was unhappy with it and I found I didn’t like it as much as I should have so I decided to redo it through the Christmas holidays.

As soon as the holidays started I began looking for tutorials on anything unreal based just from creating a simple bsp to adding water volume to a level. This was the clicking point for unreal I needed and then I began working on my new base.

I actually found it easier to work more in unreal then working in 3DS Max and spent most of my time on that making a base, adding extras, editing lighting and so on.

I changed my rooftop because I felt it didn’t work as a level and when I’d finish remaking my base I had created a larger level. The textures were a lot clearer, I’d created a slight surrounding to the level as well. I feel my new rooftop is better than my old rooftop.

Unreal

And so after 2 years of the program I think I can finally say that I enjoy using it.
I spent most of the summer holidays learning a lot of things about it. One day was just me going through a lot of tutorials and finally after watching a few the penny dropped and I can finally understand how to use the program.

When I originally tried making BSP’s in Unreal I was continually using additive blocks to create a base, I found this hard to do and very time consuming. After going through one tutorial I found that rather than looking at as building blocks I was to look at it like a block of rock and I have a hammer and chisel, so I started subtracting from my base instead of adding. This allowed me to create a more “detailed” shape.

I also looked at materials and lighting. I found out that not only did I have to edit lighting by right-clicking the light in the level; I could also edit my environment settings to edit certain effects of the lighting. I was struggling with making convincing sunlight, so I looked at a few settings on previous unreal levels and changed my settings accordingly.
Particle effects were another thing I struggled on. I couldn’t find a tutorial for it on blackboard and so I turned to youtube to try and find a decent tutorial on it. After searching through countless videos I found one explaining how to apply your own texture to a particle effect and found out that they work with emissive textures.

I did plan to do more to my level. Recently I’ve been trying to add sound to it to make it more immersive. After multiple tries at trying to import sound nothing would import. I still can’t work out why it hasn’t worked since they should be the correct file names and types.

I found that redoing part of my rooftop project in the Christmas holidays really helped me learn the unreal editor. I’m more confident with using it and it has made me realise that I really want to use it for making my Final Major Project.