Work Experience Journal - Day 27

I tried downloading the reactive dynamic water and extracting the file with 7Zip at work and it managed to extact it. I can only think that 7Zip was able to extract the "RAR Archive" file because I'm running an outdated version of 7Zip and work runs the most up to dated version of 7Zip. After all that I decided not to go through with it as it took a long to load and I didn't want to increase the minimum requirements of the game.

It had another crack at the height map. Now that I know about "SM_Plane_1000_512", I created a plane with 512 subdivisions but Maya advised me at it couldn't handle that many polygons so I settled on 256 and it still failed to work. So I saved all my work and made a 512 subdivision plane. Sadly, this didn't work. It turns out I had forget to put a collision box on it. Even after all this I was not working how I intended it to work. Shooting the height map only affected one corner and not the rest of it. After going back over and over the tutorial, the only reason I can guess why it's not working is due to incompatible issues.

I decided with time running out to create static water. I followed a tutorial by Game Dev Academy. He was very informative and explained everything very well. I managed to get the water working first time.

I followed a different tutorial by Xxyoth to try and get objects and actors to appear through walls. Just like before I managed to get it working the first time. Then I tried to add that effect to the character when a key is pressed. My first idea to solve this was to add a post processing volume about his head and when the button is pressed I set the post processing volume onto his head but it didn't work. My next idea was to just set the post processing volume to unbound when the button is clicked and it worked.

After doing some research, I decide to create a mirror. I saw that there where two ways to create a mirror. The first method involved planar reflection actors but I decided not to go this way due the amount of computing power needed for this as it renders the what appears in the reflection again. The second method involves "scene capture 2D" which gets the view on a camera and projects onto a render target which can be placed into a material. After following a tutorial from Shaun Foster I realised that the "reflection" was flipped due to the reflection coming from a camera and not being a true reflection. So searched the internet and found a way to flip textures in Unreal. Then I tried placed multiple mirrors and realised that they all searched the same view. So I tried modifying the a previous tutorial I've watched by Rodrigo Villani and I got the material blueprints set up but I couldn't figure out how to change parameters in materials from actors. So I created multiple different material and in the construct script told the actor if "mirror number" equal a certain number, set plane to this material.

After some more research, I decide to create a conveyor. I followed a tutorial from UnrealEngine and got it working. At the end they mention that "The static mesh would have a texture that panned to look like a conveyor. So I researched panners and followed a tutorial from Epic Games to help get a greater understanding. Then I create a conveyor texture in Photoshop and used my new found knowledge to make the texture move on my conveyor. It was all going smoothly, until I made the static mesh the root. After that it collision box for the conveyor was affecting its self cause the conveyor to move in the direction it was pointed at. Luckily, there was a simple solution, I set the mobility of the static mesh to static and it worked.

I watched a video by Rodrigo Villani on how to control material parameters in actor blueprints. Once I had watched the video and figured out how to use "set parameters value", I added it onto the conveyor blueprint and got it working. This is an amazing discover that can help quickly change material in the editor and during game-play. This will be extremely helpful in the future and present. I can use this to have multiple 2D target renders in one material instead of have multiple material which optimises my materials heavily as I have got to repeat the same blueprints multiple times.

I finally decided to get rid the lighting needs to rebuilt error. So I looked up how to rebuilt lighting and rebuilt it.

Quickly went over the dynamic water one last time work hoping to make it work but failed.

After doing some research, I decided to try and create a carpet. I stumbled upon a rug tutorial by Barry Lowndes which use parallax occlusion to create varied rug height.The tutorial when perfectly fine but a cut backs had to be made on my side. I do not have access to Substance Painter and the programs I had access to were limited, so I painted the texture, roughness map and normal in Paint 3D which made look bad but it was good enough for testing purposes.

Today, I learned a lot about material blueprints and how they work. This allows me to do so amazing things with materials. This will be very useful for creating similar stuff to this in the future. Panners could be used for waterfalls, treadmills and even cars that are meant to be seen far away. The 2D scene capture could be used for security cameras systems and more accurate reflections on water or shiny objects without the use of planar reflectors.

Harvard Referencing

Marvel Master. (2019) FREE Unreal Engine 4 Reactive Dynamic Water V3 Project Download [UE4.20].YouTube [video]. 27 January. Available from: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pX82z77TZc4 [Accessed 11 February 2019].

Lowndes, B. (2016) Parallax Occlusion Mapping in Unreal 4 / Rug. YouTube [video]. 2 March. Available from: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0hoT8fJJgoU& [Accessed 11 February 2019].

Villani, R. (2017) UE4 Tutorial 101 — Occlusion Outlines. Youtube [video]. 24 February. Available from: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rL7VUeZzRyQ [Accessed 11 February 2019].

Living in Las Vegas. (2017) Walking thru Mandalay Bay Las Vegas. Youtube [video]. 7 September. Available from: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wjPgCdNJyLI [Accessed 11 February 2019].

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Living in Las Vegas. (2017) Exploring THE LINQ Las Vegas!. Youtube [video]. 19 September. Available from: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nF8vgwzp72k [Accessed 11 February 2019].

Villani, R. (2017) UE4 Tutorial 101 — Control Materials in Blueprints. Youtube [video]. 16 February. Available from: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I8s-Bt-YOUg [Accessed 11 February 2019].

Foster, S. (2018) Unreal Render Target & Scene Capture 2D. Youtube [video]. 16 February. Available from: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a9iho861SlY [Accessed 11 February 2019].

Game Dev Academy. (2018) #3 How to Create Water in Unreal Engine 4 | Unreal Engine 4 for Beginners Tutorial Bonus Step. Youtube [video]. 28 August. Available from: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XyBfsVF6y0Q [Accessed 11 February 2019].

Xxyoth. (2018) [UE4 Tut] Post Process Material to make you see silhouettes through walls (and other meshes). Youtube [video]. 15 February. Available from: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=959Q75Uqte4 [Accessed 11 February 2019].

UnrealEngine. (2015) Making a Simple Converyor Volume | Live Training | Unreal Engine. Youtube [video]. 2 March. Available from: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aqRUe7pm4Ok [Accessed 11 February 2019].

Villani, R. (2017) UE4 Tutorial 101 - Perfect Dynamic Mirrors. Youtube [video]. 4 January. Available from: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UZsr7HlLQ-Y [Accessed 11 February 2019].

MortMort (undated) Colour Palette: SoftMilk32. Available from: https://gumroad.com/l/qMfX [Accessed 11 February 2019].

indiamart (2019) Otis Escalator Spare Step, for Malls, 800mm/1000mm width. Available from: https://www.indiamart.com/proddetail/otis-escalator-spare-step-16702869488.html [Accessed 11 February 2019].

Epic Games (2019) Lighting the Environment. Available from: https://docs.unrealengine.com/en-us/Engine/Rendering/LightingAndShadows/PlanarReflections%E2%80%8B [Accessed 11 February 2019].

Epic Games. (2019) Animating UV Coordinates. Available from: https://docs.unrealengine.com/en-US/Engine/Rendering/Materials/HowTo/AnimatingUVCoords [Accessed 11 February 2019].

VigeoJames. (2014) How can I flip a material upside down?. UE4 ANSWERHUB, 6 October [online]. Available from: https://answers.unrealengine.com/questions/109633/how-can-i-flip-a-material-upside-down.html [Accessed 11 February 2019]

broopanda. (2014) How do I fix the, "Lighting Needs to be Rebuilt" Error?. UE4 ANSWERHUB, 31 March [online]. Available from: https://answers.unrealengine.com/questions/21980/how-do-i-fix-the-lighting-needs-to-be-rebuilt-erro.html [Accessed 11 February 2019]