Homework 8: From Blender, to Unreal, to Git

  I am developing the male player character for the game. This will be a third person game, so the entire body will be seen during the game play. I started creating the character in Blender using the Manuel Labs character creator plugin.  This plugin provides characters already drawn and rigged, and you also have the ability to adjust how they look.  The final size of the character that is created with this plugin is only about 5 MB.
  However, this character does not come with animations, and those have to be done for the game.  I was able to create a running animation, export the blender file as an .FBX, and then import into Unreal along with the animations.

The figure above is the character created within Blender.

This figure shows the character after being imported into Unreal and demonstrates the animation.

This figure shows my asset along with assets of my other teammates within the same project folder that was pulled from git.

Homework 5: Game Assets

The landscape was the first asset that I created.

This figure shows the material editor, and how the landscape material was created. The lower left portion of the blueprint shows how the landscape texture changes as a function of slope. The top middle shows the base textures along with the normal map. The lower right shows the creation of different assets that were used in conjunction with the grass tool. Those labels will now show up in the Paint section of the landscape editor. Each grass type has options associated with it that allow the adjustment of density, placement jitter, cull distance, LOD, scaling, etc.

Some changes were also made to the third person character.

These adjustments include giving the character the ability to fly by pressing the "F" key, adding the HUD widget to the viewport, and giving the player health.

The radar pulse was created by editing a radial gradient the I made in Photoshop and, after performing some math operations, applied it to a tangent curve with time I was able to animate it by expanding it out. With the radial gradient, black equals zero and white equals 1. This can be used to our advantage by multiplying the gradient by certain values and then clamping those values to change the boundary where white fades to black. The characteristics of the ring (thickness, speed, color, fade) are fully customizable by changing the values of some of the constants. The figure below shows the math on how the ring was created and animated.

The final figure shows an in-game screenshot with the HUD.

Homework 6: Create GitHub Account

I created a GitHub account. My username is nicksuttell.
A team repository was created titled Team_Fairy. Click here for the link.