I’ve been working on some asset creation tools to help with building some levels lately, and I think this one turned out fairly useful so I wanted to share it with the community. I migrated everything to a fresh project (4.18.3) and hosted on sellfy for free. You can of course donate if you choose to, but not required at all. I would however appreciate any comments you have on it.
video:
sellfy page:
https://sellfy.com/p/34Rn/
There’s no official documentation, but I’ll list some specifics on it below. The catwalk blueprint builds whatever meshes you have loaded in with a structure that controls what parts get drawn. Keep adding points as you need. The stairwell blueprint is only 2 spline points, 1 segment, set the top level height and lower the ending spline point down to the ground, or wherever you need to go. All of the meshes and materials are exposed so you can modify as you need. The demo level shown in the video is in the project obviously, so you’ll get all the meshes and materials.
Thank you and happy building! Feel free to post any questions or comments.
Includes: (full ue4 project on 4.18.3) 151MB
- demo level
- 66 static meshes (unwrapped for texture and light, non-spline meshes use auto-generated LOD)
- 2 master materials
- 7 material instances
- 3 material functions
- 10 textures (1-4096, 9-2048)
- 2 blueprints, 1 structure
Materials:
The metal, rust and paint are setup as functions and there is 1 main master material that blends them together. I had to do the blends a bit funky though to get the results I was after. To get full paint or full rust, set the value in the instance to 1000. The other master material is for the diamond plate, its world aligned and also adjustable in its instance.
Adding new meshes:
I wanted to be able to change the meshes around a lot, so its setup to be fairly modular. Few simple rules I followed for Maya, can’t speak for others, but I imagine it would be very similar.
- Model with the +x axis as forward
- Match all pivots of all meshes at the back center on origin. (use the video for a reference)
- Export as single meshes
Use the example meshes as a guide for what parts you’ll need to plug in. Also feel free to add or delete any meshes you may or may not need in the blueprint itself. Adding a new part is its own function, so you can add it right in and change the structure as well to accommodate.
A few other notes about adding your meshes:
- The pickets for the front and rear of the catwalk are instanced. When you model these, keep them inline with your railing, but also keep them inline with your pivot point (at the start of the spline).
- To keep things inline, I rotate certain parts on the catwalk bp (noted in the tooltip on the mesh variables). This was so I could use the front posts as the rear posts for example. It was much easier to keep everything lined up correctly depending on how and where you needed to start and end your spline.
- I used custom collision for the spline meshes, I did not try auto-generated collision.
- The vertical posts for the catwalk and for the stairwell both use traces to set the height. These need to be drawn with the origin at the bottom center with some set length. The blueprint comments will explain how to input them.
It will be a few weeks before I’m updated to 4.19, but I can’t imagine there would be any issues with migrating if you need to.
Thank you and enjoy!
