Iv been playing about with making a small game on the unreal engine, So far just created some assets in Maya and importing them
into unreal editor. With the idea in mind to keep doing that… and then create the actual landscape of the level in Unreal. (It’s a 3d fps style btw)
But is this what the rest of you are generally doing too?
I have to admit i do find it a bit difficult to ‘imagine’ how the final product will look when in Maya I’m only looking
at a Grid around the objects I’m building. I’m aware i could just making everything in Unreal but iv spent a lot of
time reading up on Maya and iv grown quite fond of the the environment.
unreal isn’t capable of creating the complex mesh’s that can be done in maya and 3ds, at most you could use bsp blocks to play leggo and build level content that way but your draw call count would be huge
Okay, so stick to Maya and doing what I’m doing… But design the rest of the world around those assets in unreal? or do most people create it all in Maya and just use unreal for simpler tasks?
Open an example level and you’ll see. You can easily tell what was made in Unreal because it will most likely be a primitive (cube, sphere, etc. There was a point back in UDK where you could single that stuff out but I’m unsure as to how it works now). But you’ll see that, aside from maybe a completely flat floor or wall, EVERYTHING else is created outside of Unreal. What you get when you create inside of Unreal was what used to be called a ‘Cubic Level’ (because most things wind up being made out of cubes). This usually looks cheap and un-professional unless you’ve got some serious logic behind why you’re doing it that way. I guess if you’re making something for mobile that needs to look that way (like a retro looking game) it could work. But generally it’s better to make your own assets in an outside program.
I suppose a better way of wording my question (though I’m sure iv already got my answer and I’m already on the right track) is …
Terrain… In Maya or Unreal?
From what I’m hearing it sounds like terrain + basic world, wind, water, birds = Unreal
For everything in the world (Objects, Buildings, Roads, etc) = Maya
Realized today. In my last post i said Maya or Unity… when i meant to say Unreal… sorry Unreal team…Please forgive me.
So you guys are saying i should use this external methods as a ‘temporary’ world to give me a better idea
of where everything sits. Or i should build the world externally and import it into my game and actually use it?
But i would have thought the unreal engine does the best terrain?
I mean if its the ‘standard’ that most people just create assets in Maya then bring them into the “world” in Unreal
and just make do without seeing the environment until then… It’s OK. I can live with it… I just wondered if that’s how everyone else is doing it.
Sorry if I’m going in circles here… In my head i know what i mean. And i think i know what you guys mean.
we forgive you
world machine is really powerful for creating terrain, you can output height maps that can be directly imported to ue4, or there is a mesh output node that can be used to get a mash into maya for use as a reference
i created this 2015-06-21 14_27_08-openworld.tmd - World Machine.tiff - Google Drive in around 5 mins, sculpting it by hand in unreal would take me hours or days to do
