Getting ready to dive in. Any advice?

Community Community & Industry Discussion
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Hello all,

Just created an account today, but have been lurking the forums since UE4 release learning as much as I can from the community and the devs. (I think its great that almost every post here has a response from someone at EPIC. Truly “EPIC” customer support worth the $20/mo entrance fee alone!)

Now, the reason for my post: I have zero background in anything related to game development, but for the past 18months I have been learning 3d modeling, programming, and level design from places like Digital Tutors, Infinite Skills, Lynda, Youtube, and of course these very forums. I by no means think that I am ready to create to completion the game that I have in my head, but I have to start somewhere.

I do have a continued training roadmap in place and is where I want to start:
I would like to build a fully rigged and textured WW2 aircraft carrier (Yorktown class) and put it in a realistic ocean scene with day/night and weather cycle in UE4. Once I have completed , I will move one to the next phase of my roadmap. The reason for is two fold. 1) it will give me something to show as a “proof of concept” if I decide to look for people to join my team(which is a MAJOR possibility) and 2) If I find that creating the game is not going well, I can instead sell my 3d assets. What do you guys think of approach?

The tools I currently have: Maya, 3DS , PS, After , and by the end of today UE4.

Now a couple questions:

  1. I understand that UE4 and Maya are set up well together, but almost every tutorial I see for game design for UE4 deals with 3DS . Having access to both, which one would you use with UE4?

  2. I still cant get my head around scale. Is that something I need to worry about when modeling, or just when importing to the engine?

  3. Would it be best to create the ocean scene in the 3d software, or in UE4 itself. If in UE4, can be done with blueprints?

  4. While in the process of building “game”, if there is an update to the engine should I update or stick with say 4.4 until the end? Could say 4.5 for instance break anything that I have done in 4.4

Well that’s it for now, but I imagine you will be seeing me here quite a bit looking for more input from great community. Thank you all in advance for your time,

DSIS

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Couldn’t agree more! The forums here are really welcoming! And by that I mean welcome to the forums! :wink:

I personally use 3dsMax for almost everything, but it is just my preference. 3dsMax is easier for me to make models in, as well as create the rigging for characters. However Maya is much better for creating animations (for me anyways, you can use for too), and UE4 also has an A.R.T. plugin for Maya (animation and rigging tools) to make even easier. So it depends what you are looking to create, but either one will give you the same end result, so go with the one you feel more comfortable in.

In 3dsMax/Maya, under the customization menu, make sure you have the scale set to centimeters, as 1uu = 1cm by default (uu = unreal unit). Another good way of getting the scale right is to create a box that is the height of a slightly taller human (I use 6ft = 180cm), and use to judge the scale of objects when you are modeling, using the box as a guide, so that everything looks right when it is imported into UE4 and you walk around.

There are a few ways to do , no “out of the box” ways currently, but there are many tutorials on creating water/ocean simulation, here are a few to get you started:

Dynamic Physical Ocean by Handkor:
Youtube - ?v=PBWLfpm0K0o
Forum Thread: https://forums.unrealengine/showthread.php?7440-Dynamic-physical-ocean&p=117586#post117586

Parametric “Beaufort Scale” ocean by: https://forums.unrealengine/showthread.php?26317-Parametric-quot-Beaufort-scale-quot-ocean

FluidSurface Plugin by JamesG - https://forums.unrealengine/showthread.php?3609-Project-FluidSurface-Plugin

VaOcean Plugin by ufna - https://forums.unrealengine/showthread.php?4181-Plugin-Ocean-surface-simulation-plugin-(VaOcean)&highlight=vaocean

And many more, there are many youtube tutorials on , let us know if you need some more examples!

Whenever there is a new update, you do not have to remove the old version, it adds a new version slot to the launcher. From there, if you want to convert to a higher version in your project, you can create a clone of the project, and open that in the new version so you still have a backup in case anything changes, but for the most part I have not had any issues with my projects converting them to the newest version. There will be major updates coming (parralel rendering for example), but Epic is trying to make the change as seamless as possible, so unless you are modifying the engine code in C++ (engine code, not project code), you probably will not notice any difference.

Hope helps! Good luck! :slight_smile:

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  1. it always depends on what you prefer -> I personally would use 3ds
  2. the best would be when you create a character and then build everything around that scale (e.g the scale from the blue man character) + make sure to use cm (export settings)
  3. when you use blueprints you wont get many problems (with C++ it could be that some line will be useless after the update)
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Thank you very much . As I said in my OP, I have Maya, 3DS, PS, and After . Is there any other software you would suggest. It is time to upgrade for both my autodesk apps, but if Maya can do it all I may upgrade to Maya 2015 and not upgrade

Thank you as well

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A heightmap generator like world machine or terresculptor is also pretty useful :slight_smile:

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I hope you like links! I got lots for you :stuck_out_tongue:

I also use Substance Designer & Substance Painter in my workflow, they are both really good programs. Painter allows you to paint onto your model in 3d and is a lot of fun, and exports the Diffuse/Normal/Roughness/Metallic (and more if you need to) channels as png images, which you can import into UE4, create a material, and just connect the nodes. Designer is used more for baking Normal maps, and creating ‘Substances’ (materials with parameters you can change in the editor to get different styles, among other things), and can be used in UE4 using their new plugin.
See here for more info: ://www.allegorithmic/products/substance-indie-pack

For baking normal maps without designer, I use xNormal, you export out your high-poly and low-poly from Maya/, and it will back Normal, AmbientOcclusion, etc maps that can be imported in the same way mentioned above, plus xNormal is free! See here for more info: ://www.xnormal.net/1.aspx

There are many other niche products like (Houdini, Mixamo Fuse, MakeHuman to name a few), but the programs you have already will do most if not all of what you will need for starting to create you scenes. Always keep an eye on the ://www.polycount/forum/ forums as well, many of the new and great products will be discussed there as well as here.

Also, watching the UE4 Live Streams (there is one on in 5 minutes…) ://www.twitch.tv/unrealengine will keep you up to date on what’s new with the engine, or you can watch them, as well as dozens of tutorials on youtube here: https://www.youtube/user/UnrealDevelopmentKit/playlists

:slight_smile:

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I see that both of you have a preference for 3ds . The only reason I choose Maya is that I have spent more time getting its UI down. If there is a reason you guy prefer that would benefit/ease my modeling, then it shouldn’t be too hard for me to get my head around its UI. I haven’t done enough in either to say one is “better” than the other. It really is just about my comfort with MAYA’s interface

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You should just go with the one which you are more comfortable with -> so in your case maya :slight_smile:

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Considering the tools and compatibility between Maya and UE4 in it’s current state, I’d say you are in an even better position continuing with Maya. There seem to be more bugs and tweaks happening with 3DS workflows at the moment than Maya workflows ( is just from my perception of the threads/answerhubs I’ve seen).

When first starting out, I got more tutorial help pertaining 3DS than I did for Maya - so I just kind of ended up with 3DS as my preference.

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is the exact reason I ended up learning . When I was first learning how to create models, Youtube & misc tutorial sites had tons of tutorials for every skill level, and I found most of the Maya tutorials were usually way above my skill level at the time, so ended up being easier for me to learn.

But as mentioned here, Maya is an excellent tool and will work great for you as well, it just comes down to your personal preference. :slight_smile:

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Thanks for all your help so far guys. I just finished watching the Twitch stream and something was brought up that I didn’t think about. I see that unless I use the github(which I wasn’t planning on using) version, I wont be able to create a 64bit exe? Is something I should be concerned with?