Hey folks, more of a music guy but have been dabbling in UE for roughly a year on and off since lockdown. Love the environment / level designey stuff but finding Blueprints a bit of a minefield!
At the end of the video i’m trying to get the character to be able to walk up that pathway so it’s not just 2d but the character can weave in and out of the 3d world. Have no idea how to implement it though! Need to meet some devs who can help me make this happen. Think of the battle gameplay being a bit like Viewtiful Joe and then it’s a mix of 2d and 3d (with dynamic camera) in a large world with Zelda esque rpg elements.
I have a few reccomendations, use some sort of small/low grass in front of the camera, and remove anything behind the camera for the start, make the jump noise only happen when jumping off the ground, and make your character less bright so they dont constantly show in bloom, or potentially even use the subsurface shader model, not sure how that would look but it might be worth a try. Also, you forgot to bake lighting before recording. Would also recommend using stationary lighting, to allow for character shadow and possibly dynamic shadows on the trees, like the one shown at 3:49. Also, you forgot reflection captures, 3:08 below the bridge for example.
Hey thanks for the tips Bite360. I didn’t even know about reflection capture so thanks for that. Which light source(s) would you make stationary? I currently have these all set to movable.
Thought they were all static, didnt see any shadows on the main character. Optimally you could get it to look good with Stationary DirectionalLight (with Dynamic shadow distance turned up to something like 4000, 2 cascades, on stationary), and Stationary Skylight, But its hard to do in practice. The reason i suggest those, reflection captures do not support dynamic light, and its clear you want really deep shadows in parts, which dynamic SkyLight doesnt do.
Note that you will want to set grass and other small clutter lightmap type to Volumetric lightmap (Less accuracy, but no cost to bake), and make sure the lightmaps are all green to light blue in the lightmap view. If your looking for the lightmap view, look into view mode (defaults to Lit), Optimization viewmodes, Lightmap density.
Also, put a lightmap importance volume around the playable area, stretching sideways a decent bit so it covers the camera and a little bit, but not far into the distance, say, 500UU or so. This will cut your bake times in more than half at a near nonexistant loss in quality.
If your looking on how to do reflections, just make the boxes/spheres kinda sorta fit the general geometry. Something like 1 box to cover the general shape of the reflected geometry, something like a single box covering an entire room, or a sphere capture covering a pond. They are impossible to get perfect no matter what you do, but they can look very convincing. Just dont coat the floor in them, More=Way worse in this case.
Edit: Dont forget to make the characters literally dimmer.
Thank you for all that knowledge Bite360, it’s invaluable. I ended up making the directional and skylight stationary. Initially i thought the skylight was too bright in that mode but i like it now, gives it a kinda Breath of the wild vibe, what do you think? Also added the Light mass Importance thing and dimmed the character.
Looking good! You may want to dim the enemies too, and dim the character potentially a little more, but overall it looks pretty much there, except for some tiny lighting tweaks to polish it up a little.
Small details to fix
Reduce the foliage at the very start and 4:00 for visibility. Likely re-paint it at 1/4th density. Also it will improve frame drops there by reducing overdraw.
Some things at 2:56 do not seem to cast shadow properly though which makes both the sun and fire shadow incorrectly.
Those are the only things i can think of, but if you want to include reflection captures, include one covering the cave, like this quick sketch i made in editor. Made to mirror 3:04
I can’t give advises as I juist started using UE, but wanted to say I’m a music guy too with lil knowledge and experience on C, C# and GDScript.
Would you care to join me? so we create a game together, like starting forming a team?
I totaly had the same ideas graphically speaking, would you mind to check my discord (), there are more infos about my game ideas, I’m sure they will match up and/or complete with yours.
I’m calling myself a wanna be game designer, not only a music guy ^^. and I’m actually working on 2 other games’s music!
Wow thanks man for taking the time to do that sketch, much appreciated. I did have a sphere reflection capture in that previous video but i will redo it in the way you do in above.
Here’s a new scene i was working on today which is further West and before the player comes across the Mountain scene. I have been using Openland Auto Terrain which is great but the megascans grass was so tall and i didn’t want to rescale my character as that would mean rescaling everything (kinda like the idea of the characters being smaller than real life a la little big planet). So ended up reducing the ‘locked x/y’ settings which seemed to reduce it a bit. I put that white platform in as a guide so i could see where to raise the terrain in landscape mode so it acts almost as a platform to raise her up aboe the foliage. Was also planning to have that character be able to sit on an animal (wolf/ dog etc) further into the game which would raise the height amd speed of terrain travel more.
In this new video as well, it got me thinking. You have the main campaign mode which is a story driven action rpg - and when the player progresses through that they unlock Battle mode. So like in my op i was talking about the combat being similar to viewtiful joe (or smash bros meleee etc) they unlock arenas to have fight scenes (like smash bros). For example right at the begining of the video below, the pond area with the statue in battle mode would be locked as a battle arena (either multiplayer / vs cpu etc)
Are you a programmer / Environment artist? Been super helpful. You’ve basically single handedly taught me lighting!! Can’t thank you enough.
No problem. Im a blueprint coder, but i began with lighting/shaders. The footage shown looks quite good. Only the grass problem persists, for that i suggest just making it less dense near the camera, by deleting it in front of the camera to where the player is, and painting it in with less dense grass. Also, you may want to delete the grass going into the water at 1:00, but thats pretty much it. Do you have a steam or discord?
Very good. The hill at 5:50 might need to be smoothed a tiny bit, like a once over at 0.1 power. Also, lighting needs to be rebuilt, and sprites too bright still. Also was on vacation, so I responded very late.
Thanks for sharing. I have already found some others (similar ones) at https://craftpix.net/categorys/sprites/ and I will go on looking for more. Pixel 2D is a really good plugin as for me (especially for those who start their dev journey)
