Production - Part 1

Production - Part 1

after the Pre-production we finally had a good standing of where to start and what to do in order to make our game. i worked on the modelling and world building with some help on the character creation in the first few weeks whilst Thomas Nicholls worked heavily on the character reaction, AI and climbing system. 

modeling 

simple modeling

creating models in unreal engine can be as simple or as complex as your project demands for our project it was a lot more complex to create building models on unreal engine as our game was steampunk based, at first i wanted to use 3ds max to create building models however i found it easier to use unreal th

e image is what the first buildings i made looked like.


after creating the first few basic buildings using the geometry feature on unreal and selecting multiple boxes to create a basic model of a building the player would see.

then suing staircases and other features provided by unreal engine to give more life to the buildings i made:















however even after making these houses (which took longer than expected) i did run into my first problem, when unreal engine decided to crash and shut down loosing and entire days work as it refused to recover it. so the next day i had to rebuild all the buildings as similar as i could to the ones the day before.









complex modeling

however after the minor set back of my building models being lost we then decided on how many unique buildings we would have in our game and which buildings we would have using these as examples as templates:

after another unexpected long time trying to recreate or gather some knowledge on how to make buildings like this i finally made my first complex building using unreal engine's geometry feature.




as you can see the building i made looks similar to the examples above but with my own touch to make it as unique as i could, however making each of these did take a long time and did cut into our schedule quite a bit setting us back a few days because of how hard it was to make each building.





finally after making the necessary unique buildings for our game, we then had to decide the base model building that would be placed in 80% of our map and after a while of getting ideas forward of what our generic building would look like we finally came to the compromise of using the base model from fable as an example.



then after a few hours i finally made this building which completed the set of buildings needed for our game, even with the unforeseen drawbacks.

finally in this video below you can see all of the buildings that where going to be implemented into the final project:

character modeling 

simple character modeling 

after finishing the buildings the next task was to create characters and after a short amount of time we came up with the perfect designs for each characters with the unfortunate limited fuze modeling.

however again we had a hard time Figuring out how to put models from Fuze to Mixamo because the connection between the two wouldn't work half the time and putting our creations from Mixamo to unreal engine with the textures which in the end we figured out that you needed to use 3DS max for that feature. 

complex character modeling

unfortunately we didn't have the time left to make complex characters however in my next project i'm going to focus heavily on using more complex modeling programs like cinema 4d which is easy to use powerful and with the constant updates allows you to create more complex characters. I'm also going to use blender for similar reasons for my prop models. 

Thomas Nicholls

after the character creation and modeling we moved on to the game-play elements, the AI movement and the climbing system, which Thomas had a heavy hand in making with some minor help from me and again we did come up with some problem whilst creating these two features like the blue prints made would not work and the constant crashing however after a short struggle he finally made this blue print of the climbing system and the AI movement  

this is the simple aia navigation that would move freely around our map. the only difficult part was making them stop moving though buildings and we came up with the idea of simple putting collision not only on the buildings but on the ai as well.