Interesting, thanks for the detailed response. I completely forgot about how taxing running a fluid simulation on my own computer would be, especially since I don’t have an extraordinarily powerful machine. Using an animated mesh for a large wave of water sounds like a good idea even if it doesn’t look super amazingly awesome and realistic.
As for giving the player the ability to customize the player character, I was wondering if something like that was possible in Unreal 4, creating a pre-defined mesh and allowing the player to customize it in the game by bending and warping various key points.
I wasn’t sure if Unreal could handle such huge objects without creating weird issues because I was talking with one of my friends about it and he said that you might have to scale back a little bit and use some clever rendering to make it appear that tall.
As much as I would like to make this game an open-world game (the specific game genre and scenario would be something that I think hasn’t really been done before but I’m not 100% sure) I know there’s a good possibility that I won’t. I mean, I could still make it feel like it could be an open-world, but it isn’t.
When using the Unreal engine’s blueprints feature, would knowing and understanding C++ be an asset? Not necessary, but an asset? To add to that, it makes me glad that Unreal appears to only really want C++ because it is C++. Most of my coding experience lies with C++ and even though my skill with PHP is more extensive thanks to my classes, I think that skill is easily portable to C++ because of how similar PHP is to C++.
I’m very novice when it comes to 3D modelling. My only half-way real experience with it is designing random stuff in SketchUp. I install Blender 3D on many of my computers (and have done so for a long time) but I never actually use it for anything. How would I go about learning Blender 3D, 3DS Max or Maya on my own? I’m sure that my classes will really only go over Maya (and that’s a few semesters off) and fortunately my status as a student entitles me to free Autodesk software, but I know that won’t last forever so that’s why I’m particularly interested in learning Blender 3D because it’s free, and if I’m not mistaken, open source too.