Looking at ways to assemble what is essentially the main hero prop. These are duckboards which traverse the length of the landscape.
4 hero components have been made with 4 separate materials. Blueprint was made to be able to switch between which model you want but eh materials are randomised.
Camera based tesselation
Integrated within the material to drive tessellation based on radius around camera, so a more localised and hopefully cheaper implementation of tessellation. Parameters will also control the height of the tessellation too to give more control.
I'm trying to balance this in relation to the density of the landscape terrain too.
Landscape was initially a pretty dense mesh which I'm thinking is not going to be great at optimisation. I used this dense mesh to generate a height map and then use that to create an unreal terrain.
This is giving me a lot more flexibility to blend materials, control tesselation and to take advantage of better LODing.
Changeable and instanced characters
The output at this stage is relatively simple as the final product is mainly a diorama. A main element is the soldiers which are all in static poses. This is essentially a kit bash of multiple components and accessories.
I want to expose this in the editor so i can swap and change as required for what looks good for the shot. So this is just exposing simple switches to control visibility.
The main blueprint also controls the master pose as the skinned meshes all share the same skeleton. Using a set master pose component function makes this pretty easy to do.
Project management using Trello
This one is a particularly interesting for me as I've worked on a lot of projects both in house, remotely and a combination of the two.
Jira, good old fashioned spread sheets, trello and various other incarnations of tools have been thrown in the mix. I'm particularly fond of trello and it's easy of use, so I'm determined to use it through out this project.
I've decided on this flow of lists which read from left to right and the progress goes that way. Also the sprints are weekly, for now anyway, to see how much progress can be made and to see how trello adapts and develops as I go.
Developing for VR
This was such a cool project to work on, the next challenge is to use unreal engine to transform it into a VR experience.
A unique project in the sense that I have an end goal to aspire to and maintain that quality. I'm looking forward to this as it will challenge all my real-time development experience on many levels - character set up and optimisation, materials, landscape work, lighting and cinematics.
I'm looking forward to getting stuck in and using it to really get the most out of unreal and see what it can do.
