Unreal Engine

Importing assets proved to be simple. The epic games launcher is the platform you download Unreal Engines, it comes with a marketplace where users can upload their creations for developers to buy and use. You can find a wide range of things few things including: 2D Assets, Textures, Props, Visual Effects, etc. All of which can be useful for when developing on Unreal Engine.

The marketplace provides users with free content every month, fortunately for me one of the assets that were free was a forest environment. This allowed me to skip the process of creating a forest level and move onto prototyping my idea quicker.

A thing to keep in mind is that not all assets are available on the latest version of unreal which is currently Unreal Engine 5 which only just recently came out on April 5th of 2022. The stone pine forest was compatible with my version so I imported the asset to a blank environment.

Opening up the map wasn't as straight forward as opening it from the content draw would cause it load forever, I'm not sure if it would ever open that way as I would always close the program in task manager.

To ease the process I watched a lengthy tutorial by Unreal Sensai on YouTube to get a better understanding of Unreal Engine. The tutorial was incredibly useful which allowed me to progress with my scenario.

With the new knowledge I knew to import the forest by going to File and clicking Open Level.

Having opened the level, I was impressed by the scale of the map and the richness of details. It was ideal for my scenario, the only thing I would need to change would be the size of it as I don't need the entire map to perform my scenario but more on that later.

Unreal Engine comes with an in-built plugin Quixel Bridge which is a library full of assets such as surfaces, materials and 3D models. From which I was able to grab a 3D model of a campfire which was perfect for my scenario.

With the campfire downloaded, it's as simple as dragging the mesh into the world with the material already applied to the object.

Materials can have different levels of textures so with that in mind, you can create a material for a mountain where the first layer is grass, second layer is rock and the third layer is snow. Unreal Engine will smoothly blend these layers to create a realistic looking mountain.

Ratings for Importing Assets

Importing Difficulty: 1

Difficulty of Use: 2

The landscape features is a powerful tool, you can make entire maps with this tool alone and it integrates wonderfully with materials.

From my research maps are made in 3rd party software such as World Machine as it's better optimised and equipped to making maps. That is not to say the in-built landscape features is bad by any means.

The map is divided into a grid of chunks to which I was able to remove the majority of the map. The process was straight forward, all I had to do was go to manage then delete and then just click every chunk I wanted to get rid of. Since there were a huge number of chunks I changed by brush size to get rid of more than one chunk until I was left with a 3x3 chunk.

To give the mountain a bit more life, I added water. The water plugin is the official way of adding water, but I did struggle to get it to work properly so instead I added a plane shape and gave it a water texture.

Originally the hole for the water wasn't there, I added that through the landscape options by going into sculpt and shift-clicking for the terrain to form downwards.

Similar to the landscape mode, you can go into foliage mode to add things likes trees, bushes and grass. You pick the models you want to paint with, you adjust the settings such as the density of the brush and you simply paint your landscape. This makes your terrain come to life in a fast and efficient way.

Ratings for Changing Terrain

Importing Difficulty: 3

Difficulty of Use: 3

Working with audio was one of the easier parts of the engine. Simply dragging in MP3 or WAV files in to the contents draw allowed me to use the audio without much setup.

For my scenario I added a fire sound for the camp fire and enabled sound attenuation, this allowed me to create a realistic sound which has a drop off range so the closer you get the louder it is.

It's worth noting that WAV files are bigger in size the MP3 so when creating an environment with a big range of audio it would be more efficient to use MP3 files.

Every sound can be turned into a Sound Cue, which essentially allows the user to plug in any filter they want to add to the sound. As an example the user can add birds sounds with reverb and randomness by simply dragging the nodes from the side.

Ratings for Modifying Audio

Importing Difficulty: 3

Difficulty of Use: 3

I imported a fire particle system from the starter content. I was able to place it in my environment on top of the campfire model. This completed my campfire giving it flames and smoke coming out of it

Going into the options of the fire system, I was immediately lost and I had no idea what I could and couldn’t do.

I resorted to online tutorials, but most tutorials were based on the older version of Unreal and weren’t applicable for my case.

I decided that even though I was unable to change anything, I was happy with the particles I had in place. So I left the particles as they were.

Ratings for Altering Particles & Effects

Importing Difficulty: 2

Difficulty of Use: 5

Moving onto items, I quickly discovered that implementing usable items would be complex and again it would be a struggle. I tried to look up tutorials online about using items and changing the settings, but in the end it was far too complicated.

The original idea was to have the water bucket I imported earlier, to pick up water and then you would use the bucket to throw the water on top of the campfire to put it out. Since I couldn’t get this system to work, I had to improvise.

Part of the inbuilt content contains a gun which I imported into my environment. The plan was to create a water gun instead. I was able to find the location of the bullet material and changed it to water, which would give the feel of a water gun.

Finding the gun sound was a bit tricky, but I managed to find it in the gun settings and I changed it to a water squirt sound. In doing so, I completely created a water gun.

Ratings for Configuring Item Attributes

Importing Difficulty: 5

Difficulty of Use: 5