I made a springy chicken ride that I wanted to be interactive; I struggled quite a lot with finding the correct thing to search Google for to make this work. All I want it to do is I want the base to stay stationary on the floor and the chicken to move on the spring when the player walks into it or tries to jump on it. I ended up using the InterativeFoliageActor which worked very well apart from the base also springed around all over the place through the floor, and the collision on the chicken had disappeared, so the player can just walk straight through it. I fixed this problem simply by deleting the base off the chicken mesh, and making a separate base with an invisible barrier collision going up through the chicken mesh.
In most of the Fable games, some of the key bad guys are the Hobbes, they are frog-like goblin creatures that aren’t very good at fighting and yet they are everywhere in the game, constantly challenging the player. I thought as a tribute to this, I would create my own overweight goblin creature to have as a type of bouncy castle in my playground. So as to not just copy the Hobbes from Fable, I looked into other goblin designs that other people had come up with, and from this I made my own. I couldn’t figure out how to get the bouncy element onto my goblin, the only thing I could find on online tutorials was a jump pad that is already in UDK. It seems that you cannot change one of your own assets to be bouncy, without writing a lot of code. So I just used the default one in UDK and hid it in the goblin’s stomach, you cannot see it and it works very well.
I decided that my level would look a lot more atmospheric if it was set at night and only lit by lanterns and the moon. Also this would be a good idea as my buildings are quite close to the ground so I could add mist to hide the ground and the horizon line. I found out that mist is very easy to add in UDK and I even ended up helping some of my peers with this. Once I had finished with making all of my assets, I made a standard house shape to appear in the background, it isn’t very detailed but gives the player more of an idea that they are in a town rather than just floating in space. I added the beams on my houses as separate assets so as it didn’t mess up the original meshes and that meant that I could reuse the buildings as part of the background and they wouldn’t stand out from the other house I had made for the background.I had a few problems when I made my map to be night instead of day, for some reason my Kismet animations disappeared and my jump pad stopped working, I had to re-do all of these. Other than a few minor problems, mainly down to being a complete noob at the program, I haven’t really had any major challenges, which I am very happy with. I am really enjoying this project and it has made me realise even more that being a 3D Environment Artist is what I want to do for a job, once I leave university.
Parallax windows are something that I have always wanted to be able to do, so having a tutorial on this made me very excited. I had seen this done in games and always wondered how it worked, but didn’t know what it was called so couldn’t find out for myself. I found it quite difficult to begin with, as I didn’t understand about putting different images on separate RGB channels in the same Photoshop file, but after again search the internet, I figured it out. My resulting windows look quite good from a distance, I used a 128pixel texture as it was only going to be used on small windows, but because of this the “room” behind the window looks a bit fuzzy if you get close to it, but you can’t actually get close to the windows if you are playing the level.
The next big thing that I learnt was how to make smoke using particle effects. We had a tutorial on how to make rain, so I understood a little bit on how this would work, it’s the same sort of process really, so it wasn’t too difficult. I played around with a lot of the different tools and menus in the particle editor, and was actually very impressed with the end result.
Conclusion:
All in all, I loved this project, it gave me a lot of freedom to learn new things in UDK, and I feel that I should have already known some things, but at least I know them now. I really enjoyed doing a 3D environment as that is what I would like a job doing, and I have learnt a lot. My level overall was a success in my opinion, and I don’t think that I would change much if I would have had more time. The fly-through was a massive annoyance and it did stress me out quite a lot. (I managed to create my camera sequence quite easily, it ran very smoothly and showed off all of the good parts of my level in a professional manner. However when it came to exporting my fly-through, I had a major problem. It wouldn’t play my camera sequence to be recorded, all that happened was an extra window came up onto the but it was completely black except for the HUD of the player, and only recorded between 2 and 12 seconds of black footage, before closing. It would play completely fine in the keyframe/camera view, just not when I pressed the record button. It saved these videos out correctly, but obviously the footage wasn’t correct. It turns out that the only thing that I needed to do to fix this major problem was to save my package and my level into the UDK folder in the C drive and reopen UDK, rather than having it externally referenced. The fly-through now saves out perfectly. I must say I felt like an absolute idiot for not knowing this, but on the other hand, there is no information regarding this issue anywhere and no one that I spoke to could help.) However mainly I have been quite calm during this project, I have been working on it every day and have enjoyed working on it. If I had more time I could have possibly made it bigger, but at no point did I rush during this project, I did exactly what I planned to do.
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