The area being focused on for this assignment is a dynamic
scene in UE4, based around a scene similar in style to Borderlands, which will
explore areas of the UE4 game engine such as particle systems, lighting,
animations and triggers. The reason behind this choice is to improve my
knowledge further of the program and different techniques to produce the end
results. These elements have been used together in full game levels before and
while not new are useful in how to make a level operate more efficiently in
terms of balancing looks with performance. The success of this project will be
based on the knowledge gained through the use of the toolsets which will later
be analysed within a report after the project has concluded.
The intent of this design and develop is to increase my
knowledge of the program, Unreal Engine 4 (UE4), which is a game engine
allowing various assets of a game level and other components such as lighting,
physics and scripting to be assembled together to complete an in-game
environment. The project can also be used to compare the predecessor of UE4
being UDK. Since Borderlands was developed and released using UDK, by
replicating the chosen section of environment we can then see that UE4 has
improved over UDK.
As stated, the assets inside UE4 have been used in similar
ways to which I will be utilising them and I will be using previously explored
examples and knowledge from current users to implement these into my project.
The assets I will be using include: Lighting, Triggers, Matinee, Particles,
Blueprints and BSP/Landscapes. Lighting can be used for various effects, in
this case it will be used to simply light the environment. Triggers will allow
a player to walk around and set off events such as pressing a button to open a
door. Matinee controls various animations such as cameras or object movements.
Blueprints allow for coded events and AI, in this environment it will be used
to create a toon shader similar to that of a Borderlands style. Lastly, BSPs
are simple shapes that can be manipulated to build an environment faster and
easier than creating and loading objects into UE4. All these will be used in
conjunction with each other to create the scene.
During this project, there are many areas I need to research
and explore but I still believe it is within a reasonable timeframe for
completion. My current areas of knowledge extend from UDK with BSPs, importing
objects, Matinee, basic usage of Kismet (Now known as Blueprints), Triggers and
Lighting. A lot of these tools are replicated in UE4 and a small refresher of
how they work is all that should be required. In terms of manipulating them for
what I need to accomplish, I will use previous examples and the official UE4
website which hosts guides on how to achieve specific results. The last tool
I’ll need to research more extensively is the particle systems as I have yet to
use these in either UDK or UE4.
