For this week it was a little introduction to the unreal engine and how we could manipulate it to design our world. The unreal engine is a powerful piece of software which has the rare ability to render in real time which gives you a realistic environment worthy of a big screen movie. It also acts as a good tool to add subtle changes to the world, movies, or games like animating blades of grass. For the task today we were to make a plan and create a beach environment using premade assets and ultimately experiment with the software.
To start, we had to load in a plan from our project files and remesh it so we could properly model it and add the textures in the next step. This is kind of like adding a subdivision to a plain blender. I did run into a problem where unreal didn’t load the substate bate file, so some elements are not going to work. To fix this it was just clicking a box, but this ended up to 2 hours to load, which wasn’t good.
The next step was to add some deformation to the plain which in theory adds depth and base geometry. I did this by using a piece of nod texture and using the defuse map to add all the depth and crevassing the texture required.
Then it was time to add the other texture maps, such as the normals and the ambient inclusion. To do this, I created a new material and uploaded the other maps to the new tab to create the nodes. After that it was just a matter of connecting each node to the right channel.
Then it was a matter of adjusting the light and book to mark each camera for the product. It was ok, but I’m starting to find that the software is having a bit of trouble running on my PC and if it continues, I may need to decide when it comes to adding my creature to the world at a later date. I also added some of the preloaded props unreal had as there was a bit of a problem with fab and quixel bridge where none of the assets were transferring to the local tab, so I compromised and used what unreal already had.
Creature progress
For this week i was just continuing with the retopology of my creature and finishing off the last few segments. Overall, the process has been ok, with there being some spirals in it like the ears and a few on the back of the head, but I solved them by using some of the methods from the little excesses from the previous week. From this I took the diamond strategy because the loops were converging in a way that was not supporting the loops around it and creating 5 sided shapes in the process so by using this method, I was able to get them flowing better as a whole. The ears were difficult to do as during the dyna mesh phase two of them had joined together, making it hard to separate them during retopology. I did find a way to fix this after I had completed the whole model, I took out the dyna mesh and used the sculpting grab tool in blender to move it into the right place. This did create some ears with the typology, so I went back into the ploy quilt and patched it to the best of my ability. I am pleased at how this stage turned out and now I am just waiting for feedback just in case I have missed anything big and latently it is a safer bet in the long run. In the meantime, I am going to work on optimizing the unreal engines for my pc and book marking any brushes, alphas, and assets to use in my world.
Unreal engine (N/A 2025) Features (online) https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/features
Unreal engine (N/A) We make the engine (online) https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US