In my current unreal class, we got an assignment to make our own level building tool, and tbh I’m kinda stumped for ideas atm, mainly because of the short time we have to do it. I would really appreciate some ideas of a simple but still useful level building tool. The example we got was a pallet tool, i.e. placing pallets on top of each other, but of course I can’t do that for the assignment since it would be a copy/paste job.
I’m also a bit worried in case I want a career as a tech artist. If I find a task like this stressing and difficult, should I even consider such a career? I just want to hear what people think or if they have any experiences with the job position, and if it’s stressful.
Look for “Houdini procedural house” (or whatever instead of house). This is to get ideas.
Then use lyra to create that in unreal.
For eg:
Idea from asking uncle gogel about: “Houdini procedural tuytorial”
lyra tutorial:
Other ideas:
L-Systems (this is probably outdated now):
Wave Function Collapse:
Other ideas:
-creating planetary system when you give orbits, periods eccentricity etc for planets. Then it create planetary system and move it.
stairs - create stairs made out of instanced static mesh (flip textures and rotate brick/step mesh around. You can also do variations of brick with lyra code.
walls from bricks - again same as stairs (you can even modify stairs code to do walls, as wall is stairs, just different offsets for each layer of bricks/stones).
lyra has nice function to use normal map/ height map to create 3d mesh out of it, you could make tool that creates totems/carved walls out of texture.
As to carer as tech artist.
look what is going on with deep ai generated art, do you think this career is safe for next 20-30 years? IMO you should switch to game developer/programmer (C++). This is safer, because you can always be just C++ programmer and get job outside game dev. If you are good at art, do C++ now. Being programmer with hobby skills in art, is much better that being artist with hobby skills in coding.
ps.
For tech artist they will ask you to make shaders ie HLSL code:
