I’ve recently decided to start my journey learning Unreal Engine in order to focus on making more 3D game-development projects. With previous projects largely focused on 2D games, I thought it would be best to share my thoughts of switching and learning about creating 3D worlds. As a disclaimer, I am without a doubt a beginner while learning this engine, so this serves less as a guide and more as a trial and error blog post. Now that we have that out of the way, let’s start creating!
Table of Contents
Starting With the 3rd-Person Perspective Base Level
Becoming Familiar with Unreal Engine’s Material Creation System
Adding Player Features & Physics
Animations + Final Thoughts
Starting With the 3rd-Person Perspective Base Level
Unreal Engine allows for its users to begin with a base world to start out. With this map, they already add a moveable character and 3rd-person camera perspective to move throughout the map. I thought this was pretty helpful so that I could examine the Blueprint interface and see how they handle movement for both the playable character and camera.
In order to test out how to change the meshes and textures of different materials, I went to the Details panel and changed the Element Material Instance and likewise altered the colors of the grid lines and cubes through Unreal Engine’s Blueprint Material Instance Graph. This was the part of the project where I was playing around with the engine more, but that’s the fun of customization. I even went to Unreal Engine’s store to add a tree and liven the map!
Becoming Familiar with Unreal Engine’s Material Creation System
Now to get to the more complex parts. I thought it would be nice to start out with learning how to create materials and landscapes in the engine before beginning to program a base game level. That way later on, I could create a game of two levels where after succeeding in the first level, you get to traverse into the next one.
To start, I migrated to Unreal’s Quixel Bridge that offers many free 3D models and surface materials that make landscape creation much easier. Using this, I started messing with the material mesh UI to create different surfaces for when the landscape becomes rocky, sandy, or grassy.
The sculpting and painting of surfaces using Unreal Engine was surprisingly very similar to Unity’s handling of 3D landscapes as well. What was new to me was creating landscape instance functions and adding in material instances to make the blending of the surfaces more clean when sculpting your landscapes.
After messing with the Landscape Mode, I added a body of water through Unreal’s Water plugins, made some more edits to the shape of the map, and sculpted the landscape some more.
Plus, I added trees because… why not?
So now we have a landmass with a body of water, a forest, plants, and some rocks and we need to have some level of action that occurs here.
Adding Player Features & Physics
There’s this asset in the Unreal Engine store and it seems we could make an interesting mini-game where you listen to a golem in a post-apocalyptic world, enter these spaces while searching for an item, and return it back to the golem, allowing it to remember parts of its past.
Since this is my first time working with character animations in 3D, I downloaded from the large assortment of meshes in Sketchfab and found a great skin to use for this project. While the skin I downloaded already carried a rig, I wanted to try out the AccuRIG system so it would be smoother to download character animations from their system later on.
Afterwards, we have to add our character mesh into Unreal Engine and make sure to replace the default mesh into our newly rigged character. However, you can notice that when the new character is added, the player will not be walking and actually be moving in a T-pose. We need to make a few more adjustments in order to actually have it move within our environment.
Animations + Final Thoughts
To add the animations, I installed a few from the Mixamo store that takes your rigged character and allows you to pick from their library of animations. I picked a few that focused on idle, walking, running, and jumping animations and then created an animation controller. This allowed for the smoothness between the movement of the animations which focused on speed and checking if the character is falling or otherwise.
And here is the result as of now!:
For now, I will end the blog post here to not make this too long. What I’ve seen is just how powerful and versatile Unreal Engine is for making realistic games and makes it that much more accessible to both beginners and experts alike. This short mini-exploration of the engine was fun and I plan to spend more time on learning more game mechanics to add to the project so that I can learn more on what this engine has to offer. Thanks for reading and see you on the next part!
