Today I really started into Unreal Engine. I continued with Unreal Academy‘s very informative tutorials.
It was a bit of content importing from another project. The big thing about Unreal is that you migrate Assets/ Instead of copying and pasting files in the Back-end which is what you do with Maya.(Not very helpful particularly when you are trying to get to scripts). But with the helpful programmers and user experiencer’s at the backend of Unreal(thank you); it is so much easier.
(I can’t actually show a screenshot – but it is Right Clicking and then Asset Actions- Migrate.)
I played around with applying shaders so hence why I have a leather shaded floor – taking materials from the Realistic Rendering Project Content. I love how the material automatically looks decent without doing anything to it.
The next part of the Unreal engine learning was to create a Level from scratch. A level is the container who has all the information like sound, images, basically everything needed in a scene. We added lights and we created a floor from duplicating a single tile template. Definitely something I was not expecting.
ONE(or TWO) THINGS I LOVE ABOUT UNREAL ENGINE IS….
- How you can drag and drop geometry, materials/shaders, and I am assuming sound, into a level and onto objects. It’s so freeing. Instead of faffing in Maya.
- How you can search for files – it is so much easier and intuitive. Assuming you know the filenames 🙂
We then place our tiles, and lights in suitable XYZ locations. The Sun element is very cool which is taken in from the LHS and then we can finetune it by Selecting Atmosphere Fog in the Outliner on the right.
We can then rotate the sun like you would normally do.
One bug test we do first is to check that our Player falls on a stable piece of ground. Unfortunately for me my tile duplication didn’t work out so well so Player became a freefalling dead Player.
I faffed around and pretty much cheated by creating a new flat ground and then importing a material on top of it.
The coolest part is the sun reflection element; where we load in a sun reflection(by searching in the LHS). The one thing different with this is we need to Build from the Toolbar and Select Reflection.
With the group animation project at the back of my mind, I actually imported the project into Unreal. [For some reason Maya would not open the .ma or .mb file. However, I was able to import it into Unreal as an fbx and re-export back into Maya and it worked…the mind boggles!]
As an initial feeling, the whole interface for me is confusing. It’s all very well watching tutorials but trying to figure out how to use an existing fbx file in another program is daunting. I would love to create the seasons in Unreal and somehow export as a layer which I could use then in Blender to use together.
Overall I was impressed with my Unreal Engine attempt. The user interface is taking a bit of getting used to. It feels a lot more clunky than Maya. The videos from Unreal Academy are also 6minutes long and yet they are taking me about 40minutes to get through!
Next time its Visual Control. No idea what that means but its better than no control I guess @-)