week 2

Update

This week has been a blur of holiday food and family activities, but somewhere in all the festivities I managed to steal away and continue working on this level of mine. This week I wrote some blueprints, added terrain, ceilings, proxy rail roads, and played with lighting and post processing volumes. 

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The world is 100% made... Technically

When I last left off, my white-box was simply made of walls and floors. I've since wrapped up proxy placements of clutter, quest objects, and have even replaced the BSP floors with terrain. I'm slowly in the process of populating the environment with final assets.

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Aesthetic progress

Before I began populating some the cave, I first needed to locate an asset pack of rocks with a mesh that was of a medium complexity. I also preference packs that had a decent set of normal maps for assets. 

I located a nice set of rocks and boulders. Initially they were meant to create realistic desert locations. Each rock had up to 6 different texture maps that made up a rock's material. My intended aesthetic is to be more stylistic so in order remedy that, I stripped all but the normal map from each rock. I then replaced the color map with a solid RGB value. This process yielded the look I was going for.  ​

Progress

Here are some progress shots in my level utilizing the processes described above.

Level Comparison 

All in all, I'm glad that I'm able to objectively define the strategies and processes I've tested and learned about thus far. I am eager to keep refining the process as I added new layers of detail to the environment.

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BLUEPRINTS | THE HIGHLIGHTER

I implemented some blueprint logic that highlights the edges of specific mesh when the player is within a certain range. These object are special to the quest I'm making and I wanted to make some elegant conveyance to the player that they should further inspect particular objects in the world.  

Trace Back and Function Call

I began by making a unique collider name in my project settings and a blueprint actor given a tag name.  Using a sphere tracer, I set the range and radius at which this will activate when the player is close to an item with the specified tag name. When activated it will process to the corresponding functions below. 

function: start HIGHLIGHT Trace

while collision is detected: If the item is new and not already highlighted, turn on the highlight.
If it's already highlighted, leave on and do nothing.

Function: Stop Highlight Trace

When a highlighted actor is no longer colliding with the tracer, turn off the highlight on that actor, then nullify the function.