UE4: Street Corner

I’ve had a lot of fun working with Unreal engines in the past so I hopped at a chance to try out their latest Unreal Engine 4. Now it costs 15 dollars a month rather than their past versions which were free, but they’re definitely not wasting it. It’s incredibly easy to use, lots of documentation, w iki and marketplace, plenty of updates, plus an incredible transparency to what they’re working on.

I created a small scene to test out their vertex painting, decals, lighting, and the new PBR materials. There are already some much better tutorials on this so I’ll just be sharing some tips and overviews of these features.

PBR materials: PBR or Physically Based Rendering materials look great but you’ll have to make textures slightly different than before. I took a look at GameTextures.com because they made a ton of them and were handing some out for free. They made an easy to follow tutorial on how to create these materials. The asphalt material is very basic and shows the bare essentials of what you'll need. Unreal still gives you the option to use specular maps.

Reference sheet for PBR material values:

Substance Designer has built in UE4 functionality so you can bring the materials you make right into Unreal and edit all of its variables in the editor.

For those who have not worked with Unreal in the past you can make very inexpensive instances of your materials which your edits appear instantly in the editor. I used this one for the shutter door.

This is the master material it's instancing. These are the parameters I've placed so I could change them on certain objects that are sharing these textures. It's common to create a basic master material where everything in it is a changeable parameter but I didn't need that for such a small scene.

Prop Vertex Painting:

You can make materials that can handle up to 6 different paintable materials within it, but I’ve never needed anything near that high except when working with terrain.

I made sure I had a few verts to work with but nothing crazy since they’re just flat walls.

If you plan on making any of your own meshes you will need to make a secondary UV set for Unreal’s light map generation. Make sure that there is no overlap, fits within 0-1, and slight padding between UV shells.

Here’s how to set up a 3 material blend shader.

Now I can paint Brick (Red channel), Worn Brick (Green), and Plaster (Blue) onto the building.

The Red channel is showing up as the White (Alpha) channel.

Lighting:

For the skybox I changed it to a night sky by rotating the skylight to where it pointed up.

I wanted to keep the skybox monochromatic so I edited the overriding settings on the skybox sphere.

I added a directional light for fill lighting, omnis for highlighting, and a few spotlights with light masks around the building

Light masks are great for adding detail to a scene, even when used slightly.

I added color grading with a LUT I got from Tom Shannon to the post processing volume.

I usually create a base Post Processing Volume that affects everything. To do that you just need to check 'Unbound' in it's properties.

Decals:

The decals are very simple to make but I was getting some major bugs with my masked decals. They seem to disappear when not lit within a certain value. In my scene that meant I had to keep the lighting somewhat flat and the decals on the left side were still disappearing so I added a very slight emissive to the material. This is a known issue but it looks like it’s not an easy fix and might take a while before this issue is resolved.

Conclusion:

It’s missing some functionality you might expect in current game engines like drag selecting in perspective view and bugs on highly used features, but with how quickly Epic is updating combined with it’s very large foundation it has far more potential than it’s competitors. Though one major thing to note is that this engine is not for the weakest of computers. I can always tell when I leave UE4 on a computer because the fans sound like they’re about to blast off and my video card/motherboard died on my laptop while I was working on the project you’ll see in my next post.

My next post will go over their Landscape tools and how to build modularly for UE4 after they changed their unit size.

MP Level Design: Barracks

MP Level Paper Design: Fracked

Here’s an example of a paper map design for a Multiplayer shooter game. Here’s step by step how I went from scratch to top down map.

1 - TF2 Cheat Sheet: First I gather information about player combat and movement abilities. The map needs to allow players to use and show off mastery of their abilities. The more your map accommodates this and doesn’t get too off balanced the more successful it will be.

If the game already has a set aesthetic you don’t normally want to deviate from it unless you have to. A lot of the Aesthetics is about informing the player as to the mission objectives and team ownership. Changing up things like shape language and colors that have already been taught to the player could easily lead to confusion.

2 - Strategy: Now that the information is gathered I’ll start on the Flow Map.

To help me find where I should be adding alternate routes I created a pacing graph to help. For this instance, the slower the pacing the less entry ways into the room and if it needs to be faster I add more. I’ll get more in depth into pacing graphs in another post.

For building the Detailed Flow maps I used Google Drawings since it has multiple elevations. With it you can create shapes and connect lines to them that stick to it when you move them around, plus it’s easy to change their color on the fly. For this map I wanted to go with two major routes, so I stuck them close together so the alt routes connecting the two wouldn’t take them out of major combat for long. Originally the ground level route was on the second story but this would keep players using alt routes out of the main flow for longer than I wanted.

3 - Concept Map: With the basic design done I can get to the visuals. First I create a narrative that will work with the current game. Certain things I kept in mind while doing this. The more the two bases contrast the better for orientation, show confrontation, try to use a story that can be explained with a lot of the current art assets, and use current TF2 Red vs Blue tropes and ideas but with something fresh.

4 - Top Down Map: The amount of detail I put into a top down map changes wildly from project to project. Sometimes I’ll throw the detail map into Photoshop and do a quick paint over. This time around I built it out in Maya since I wanted to use its grid and to help visualize line of sight for important cover objects. I used Maya instead of TF2’s editor, Hammer, because I’m a lot faster with it. In Maya I created a box that was 300 units long so I could place those around to make sure I was sticking to the Scale Map I made earlier. Then I made a Sphere the size of a Sentry Gun’s Aggro radius to help me build areas out for the engineers. This is important since they are a class built to select and invest time into strengthening an area.

5 - Reference Map: For my last step I build a reference map. Usually collect these images from google searches but I also have a library of screenshots from past games I’ve played that becomes helpful. This step is great for being able to present your map to your team so they can help visualize it and especially if you’re working with artists who need to do an art pass on the level.

With the paper design solid I can finally start building it out in game. This may seem like a ton of documentation but it’ll feel like no time at all compared to the amount of time you save. Whenever you have a playtest and something isn't working right you’ll know the source of the issue and how changing it will affect the overall gameplay, scale, pacing, navigation, and flow.

Chapter 10: Credits

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