Major Project (TBC)
23/09/2024 - 8/1/2025 (Week 01- Week 16)
Yong Kai Yi (0352826)
Major Project
Ideation:
How do we end up grinding this together?
We share the same interest and ambition in Unreal Engine, yes delulu.
So we started to learn Unreal Engine during the 2-month semester break, then we had a quick teatime talk and ended up brainstorming the idea for the project. We created a Miro board together and combined all its references, ideas, and tutorials.
Proposal & Presentation Slides :
Progressions:
The initial plan was a third-person view then shifted to VR after consulting the lecturers, and then we ended up with a first-person view due to some technical and time constraints.
The slides above compiled all my progressions, including animation, modeling, texturing, technical design (blueprints in Unreal Engine), etc. It documented my blood, sweat, and tears.
Progression video dump:
First Spline Test
Experimenting ways to do the fire follow along a path interaction for Platform 3. Mr. Kannan suggested me explore spline in UE 5.3, by following a few tutorials, I realized that spline provides a lot of flexibility in creating different paths, similar to the pen tool in Illustrator. Niagara system has A LOT of settings too, to create different kinds of particles and so on.
All over the place
It's kinda fun exploring the settings in Niagara system, in the end we get to find the issue. Which mainly is the <Drag> and <Lifetime>
tutorial references:
The video above shows different modules that have various functions, this is how the tutorial taught me.
During the development, we realized that just using Niagara particles is kind of expensive for our world, especially, that time we were working in VR mode, as it costs a lot. And the fire particles don't even look good, it was kinda realistic from afar but looks so flat when get close to it, so we were thinking might as well just go for a cheaper way and move towards more to stylized.
We did explore some ways to do stylized fire but most of the tutorials are using blender,
But it might be challenging to combine the animation from Blender to UE5.3's Niagara System, because that time I wanna combine Niagara with the spline path. Hence, I just stick with using Niagara instead, but try to find a cheaper way to do it, probably combining it with materials.
UE 5.3 fire effects start from 12:23
This guy he created an orbit (invisible) first, just to make sure the path is in a circular motion then add another layer for the ribbon, to create the 'fire trail'. then the third layer is
It uses material with blend mode 'additive' which is way more cheaper than translucent.
Fire trail layers
Chaos Fracture Test in Unreal Engine 5.3
For the fracture effect, I have two choices: chaos in UE 5.3 or cell fracture in Blender.
Tutorials references:
Chaos Fracture Test in Unreal Engine 5.3 (2)
Chaos Fracture Test in Unreal Engine 5.3 (3)
There are a lot of settings to be tweaked in chaos fracture, and some how the fracture is not really enough especially when I apply it on the pillar, it doesn't work, to prevent wasting time, I just go for Blender cell fracture for the pillar and export as ABC file.
Applying it to the mask
Erm.. but it works on the face mask mesh... But there's still some weird bug when I put it into the sequencer and try to animate the timing and reverse it. The position often offset, there might be some settings I missed out.
Cell fracture test in Blender
Tutorial References:
It's definitely easier to do it in Blender, for the fracture effect, and easier to achieve what I wanted to achieve as well, including the amount of scattered pieces, how heavy I want it to be, how it reverse and so on. But... there are of course some challenges, which are the export and import part, sometimes it doesn't export the timeline well, or it doesn't fracture in the ABC file, or the scale problem or the mesh somehow looks weird. After a few tries, it works but the texture is a bit off because the cell fracture ruined the UV map, like very SERIOUS but luckily mostly the unseen part, inside part or the darker areas, (which you can refer to the Google slides, my detailed progression).
Final call sheet:
Gameplay Screenrecord:
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