Here is a matinee video that I captured from in engine to show off what the level is looking like with the modular 2D pieces:
All the work was done in Maya, Photoshop and UE4. If you would like to take a look at how the art was created, exported and set up in UE4 I have some videos for that as well.
If you are curious as to why I might be sharing all of this, well it is pretty simple. I love old school side scroller games, and I know there is so much that we could do with this genre given today’s hardware and software. I love the UE4 engine, but I do feel that if the engine were to really support these types of games (2.5D) then there is still some work that needs to be done. I really think the paper 2D stuff is very cool…but me personally, I think the 2.5D is where it is at to get the best of both the 2d and 3D world. As much as I love 3D I can’t wait to see what artist do when they get the correct tool set in their hands to easily take their 2D art skills and translate them into living interactive worlds. So my hope is that by sharing this work with the community, it will spur other artist to think about using the engine in this was as well!
My Creature UE4 plugin is already getting used by quite a few UE4 studios (well actually a big portion of my users are all on UE4),
including these guys:
Some results:
A UE4 Dinosaur demo, might be of interest to you since that seems to be what you are doing:
Tutorials:
Feel free to ask me any questions regarding my tool
kestrelm- thanks for the response. Great looking tool set you have there. I am wondering about the draw order within your skeletal meshes. Have you found any way to get full transparency sorting within a contained skeletal mesh? The only way I have found to get things working is to use a the opacity masked shader model. I would really like full transparency abilities but the draw order is not correct and there isn’t a good way (that I know of) to set that order.
Good to hear from you as well! Yes I am currently using a masked shader for my tutorials as I found it to work quite well. Transparency sorting is not within the realms of Creature; I believe it is more of a UE4 issue which they will most probably sort out in the future.
Having said that, I am however constructing my triangles and feeding them in the “correct order” so to speak in the runtime so maybe that helps. I have users who are using the translucent shader to render their Creature characters and they look great. More investigation is obviously needed but that is the info I can provide for you so far.
I am constantly updating the tool (another major feature just went in yesterday) and as you can tell it is specifically tailored towards 2D/2.5D high quality skeletal and mesh deformations (together with an advanced 2D soft body physics/dynamics system). Stay tuned for more exciting features to follow
