Wizard House in the Unreal Engine!

Phew, I've been working on this non stop for the last couple of days. I thought instead of continually polishing the scene in Maya, it would be more constructive to export the scene to a game engine and learn how it all works. I'm using the Unreal Development Kit which is in Beta at the moment. I used the editor that came with Unreal Tournament 2004 in uni so I've had some experience with something similar to this, but for the most part I've have to learn the program from scratch in a couple of days from a lot of youtube videos. The good news is I haven't had any major problems and am well on my way to getting this thing done!

I exported the objects to a special file type and imported that to the Unreal engine. Unfortunately that doesn't bring the textures along, so I had to import each texture and assign them to everything. Again. I also had to create a collision box for the things I wanted to be solid. So basically everything but the grass has an invisible box around it that stops the character from walking through the object. This means I can climb on the roof. :)

I've been playing around with the lighting a lot but because I've just made a small room to put the house in I won't bother with lighting it properly. Mostly because the Directional Light that simulates the sun doesn't light the air-tight room I made. Perhaps I should turn this into a full blown level... But I won't think about that right now. This is more of a learning experience.

And here it is in game! It's fun to walk and jump around even if there's nothing to do. Well, it is for me anyway. I still need to add a few things like the trees and grass and vines.

Hi

Other than walking and jumping, you can shoot the gun.

Bye!

Decisions

Just quickly, here are some vines.

Vines are fun to make, perhaps I should make some more. Unfortunately though, the lighting has been giving me some grief and I've spent lots of time working it out. I was fiddling around with it some more and got it to a point I was happy with, but one variation makes the front look good and the other makes the back look good.

One has a light high up in the sky that casts shorter shadows behind the house but covers the front, making it not somewhat flat and not as interesting as it could be. But the back of the house (trees, fences, etc) aren't drenched in shadow. The other has a light lower in the sky, which casts a nice shadow across the front of the house, but behind the house everything looks flat because there's no shadows under the objects.

I was looking outside in real life and when there's a small tree behind a house or it's overcast then it doesn't look so odd when something doesn't have a shadow. Since the front is the main attraction I'm thinking I should go with the lower light.

I also think I'm nearing completion, so maybe I should try to bring this thing over to a game engine. I wonder if that will be easy...

Tune in next time to find out!