Week 24: Sounds fishy!

When will the blueprints end?!

The short answer: Not yet, and looking at it, probably not that soon either.

Over the past few weeks I have been focussing a lot on blueprints and I am glad to say that I have learned a lot! I am becoming increasingly more confident in scripting using Unreal's blueprint system and on top of that I am fully enjoying it, however there is a slight problem. I am still studying Game ART - and there's a reason for that.

I was originally always more inclined to become a programmer myself. I was naturally very talented in maths and my logical side of the brain is a lot more predominant than my creative side. After I had finished school I was aiming to study maths and computer science, however things went a bit out of hand and I found myself stuck taking a gap year instead, which was followed by another gap year in which I even started working, until I finally decided that I didn't yet want to give up on my aspirations of working within the games industry and had to get back into learning.

The 2 Sides of the Brain (Logic and Creativity)

During my gap years I had tried to learn programming myself, however I quickly lost motivation and it didn't go all too well. The subject was easy enough to learn, yet I just didn't want to go on. So instead I took up a course at college labelled "Games Development", fully knowing that it will most likely be either programming or art, since those seem to be the 2 major components of making video games. When I actually started the course this turned out to be art.

At first I was a bit scared that it might not be the course for me, as I never considered myself to be any good at art, even though throughout all my school history I studied art (mostly because it was compulsory back in Germany and when I finally moved the the UK I decided to choose art as a subject since I was so used to having it within my curriculum.) After I had spent a couple of weeks it quickly became apparent though, that most of the people on the course didn't seem to be the creative type either, so I adjusted. I then also discovered 3D modelling and quickly fell in love with it. Although I never considered myself to be a creative person, I absolutely LOVED creating things. 3D Modelling is quite a bit more technical than drawing and it suited me a lot more than using pen and paper, so it became one of my favourite things to do! I even took part in the very first 3D Speed Modelling Competition endorsed by World Skills UK and won!

So throughout my time at college, I discovered the second side of making video games and I was more inclined than ever to get a job in the industry. I ended college feeling quite comfortable with my 3D skills, however I knew my 2D was still quite lacking, so I ended up applying for DMU, since I had heard that the Game Art Design course at DMU is a lot more 2D oriented at the beginning and I had hoped that this would give me a chance to improve my skills in that area. Safe to say I was more than excited when I had heard that I managed to get accepted onto the course.

Looking back at it now, I definitely got what I asked for in the first year. A lot of drawing and still quite a bit of creating 3D models; And my skills in the 2D area improved drastically. The second year however, the curriculum had changed. The industry was moving forward fast, so the course had to change in order to adapt the changes in the industry. We went from covering the basics of art straight onto content creation and as much as I had liked to have another year of going out and drawing the world, I wasn't too fussed. In the end I knew that what I truly wanted to do in the industry was anything to do with 3D modelling (most likely environments, since I am still not too much into characters) and actually creating my concepts in 3D would help me get better in that area.

With the last project (Container City) and this project (Alice in Wonderland), my focus has changed a lot back into working more technically. Especially using the Unreal Engine 4. Since most people on our course are more creative than technical I sort of felt inclined to take over the scripting side of level creation; (A level is not a level, unless it's interactive!) - And I thoroughly enjoy it as such, due to my history of learning how to script and my more logical brain. However, I have slowly been thinking more and more about the art side and I really need to start taking care of that. So I really want to get back into doing more arty stuff for this project. However, as it seems right now this won't happen too soon, since there is still a lot to be done on the interactiveness of our level and I am working full steam ahead to make sure we get everything into our level that we want to.

So let's get into what I have done this week.

Funky Fishes and (K)omplex Kelp

This week started a bit earlier than Monday, since I had received a message from Anya who had finished rigging and animating her fish models and had them ready to be imported into the engine for me. So I sat down in the evening on the weekend and gave it a quick go, which worked out great and by Monday morning the fishes were all in the engine and had their animations assigned, so that I could begin scripting a simple AI for them.

To do that I took my butterfly blueprint as an inspiration and made minor changes to it to make it seem more like a fish than a butterfly. I am glad to say that I managed to get the blueprint working pretty quickly and the fishes look absolutely adorable! Unfortunately. I haven't got any screenshots available, but if you head over to Anya's blog you can have a look at them.

Furthermore I also took on another little challenge that arose this week. Anya had modelled a string of kelp and rigged it to animate it to move slowly so it looks more lively underwater. As it stands right now, you can't use the foliage tool to paint skeletal meshes in Unreal, which meant that we had to come up with another solution, since placing every piece of kelp by hand seemed a little over the top. To solve this issue we once again resorted to using blueprints.

I knew that it was more than possible to generate random foliage with blueprint, since there was an example of this in the blueprint examples demo in UE4. I also have been becoming a lot more accustomed to using the construction script within blueprints in UE4. This meant that creating this kelp generating blueprint wasn't all too challenging. However, I only managed to get it to work for a square area at first, by using 2 points that mark the start and end of the square that you could place as needed within the world. The hard part was making the kelp generate in a circle around the area.

My first idea to solve that issue was jumping straight into calculating the area of a circle: pi*r^2, however while that gave me the area of the circle, it was the size and not the actual coordinates. This was a lot more complex and after some research I finally got it. This is also when I realised that I did this sort of thing before when I plotted a circle into a graph using maths. The simple solution to this problem was using sine and cosine. Using sin(A)=x and cos(A)=y you can find a single point on the circumference of the circle. 'A' represents the angle (so 0 would be facing straight up and 90 facing to the right, etc.). So for my kelp generator I used a random float between 0 and 360 to find a random point on the circumference and then used a random float between 0 and the radius of the circle to find a random spot within the circle to place the kelp at.

You can find a bit more about this on Mark's blog and also about how we solved some more issues underwater.

Rocky Road ahead?

I still have to create some rocks in the near future. This is one of the only arty things that I got assigned to do for this project and I really want to get into it. I did some practice with zBrush earlier in this project trying to create rocks, however I haven't actually done a rock that I was pleased with yet. Due to a recent lecture from a third year about baking normal maps I think I found a reason why my rocks just didn't look that great, so I am aiming to get some better looking rocks done pretty soon.



Oh and I also did a bit of a personal project. I sat down and tried to script a little Tetris game in Unreal, just using blueprints. The game is still in development, however there is a playable version here: http://goo.gl/7R5aQh Tell me what you think about it in the comments.