Creating water and fire inside Unreal Engine

  This was for an assignment during the last week in Level Assembly and Lighting at Full Sail University. The water was made mostly using a normal that I created in Photoshop and Crazy Bump. In order to do this just make a 1024 by 1024 document in Photoshop and make the black/white color options into light grey and dark grey. Then from the dropdown Filter>Render>Clouds. You can do this a couple times to get the pattern you like. Then copy that to clipboard and open Crazy Bump, paste that copy to clipboard. Once the image has been pasted to Crazy Bump you'll need to tweak the settings to make it look right. For waves you'll want to turn down the fine and medium details and turn up the large and extra large details. Copy this to clipboard again and take it back into Photoshop and save as a targa file.
  Now that we have the normal map saved as a .tga file you'll need to import that and a poly plane (UV mapped) into Unreal Engine. Create a material as well and then open up the material and the poly plane options like so.

Once you have everything open you'll need to set up the water/wave to much more closely resemble actual water. Here is a playlist of videos that I watched to get it all set up. 

Once you have everything set up and a ground-like texture on the floor mesh it should look something like this.

This is just a very simple waterplane applied to a poly plane, I'm sure you can do something alot fancier but this was just a quick learning experiment. Thanks for checking in on this instructional blog post, and have a great day!

Competencies In Art Creation for Games

As I wrap up my Art Creation for Games class at Full Sail, I realize how much of a help it was to me. It provided a more in depth look at how the pipeline works in making video games and how I fit into that pipeline.

As an Environment/Prop Artist you'll need experience in how to create a blockout, high res and game res of an asset/model. Here are some screenshots of a barrel I modeled today in the three examples.

Once the asset has been fully modeled and the Game Res has been UV'd, you'll want to use transfer maps to bake the normals and ambient occlusion of the high res onto the game res.

Now at this point you can choose to texture within Maya, Substance Painter or Photoshop but I have chosen to do so in Substance Painter. Use your knowledge of the program you choose to create realistic textures and apply them to the model. In Substance Painter I use the materials and smart materials to create an asset that can be used within a game engine.

I am importing my barrel asset into UE4 (Unreal Engine v04) and attaching the textures I made in Substance to the model. It's as easy as connecting the correct texture to the right plug in. Your metallic texture gets plugged into the metallic, normals into normals.

Now that you have the asset in a game engine and the textures applied to a material you will need to apply that material to the asset. In UE4 all you'll need to do it click the material and drag it onto the asset within the 3D viewer. It's wonderful how easy UE4 is, dragging and dropping is all you'll need to do for anything within the engine. Now from here you can either take a screenshot (on a Mac it's cmnd+shft+3 for full screen and cmnd+shft+4 to do a freehand screenshot), or you can use UE4 high render screenshot option. 

You'll need to click the option box shown here to pull up the menu.

Here is the menu dropdown, shown after I clicked the aforementioned arrow. Go ahead and click on 'High Resolution Screenshot' button.

This option window will pop up. You can choose any option under screenshot size multiplier, but I wouldn't recommend anything over 3, and here you'll see that I chose 2. Once you decided on your options just click the button shown to take the screenshot. A little popup will show up, and to view the screenshots within their folder just click the popup. Here are some high resolution renders on the barrel asset.