Unreal Engine Tutorial [WEEK 10]

Light task -

I first selected the first person view and tested out the basic controls, those being left click and WASD to move around space, left click to roll the camera, middle mouse button to move camera, and right button to pan camera up/down. On the whole these are very similar to Maya's navigation settings. At the top of the screen there is a green arrow, pressing this will allow you to enter the character view where you can run around the space and interact with objects, this is representative of how your game would run in the final product. To exit this, press the Esc key.

The first thing we had to do for this task was create a gazebo or some sort of sheltered simple structure. I decided to create a sort of tent gazebo by first going under the Window tab, Pressing place actors, to place something in the scene, i picked the geometry tab and selected a box. I could adjust the size with the brush settings on the right, not the transform tools like i would do in Maya, By clicking shift-7 i can open the editing mode to more precisely edit objects. To close this mode, press shift 1. Once i was happy with my shape, i used the material tab to place a texture on my object, making sure to toggle select all adjacent surfaces in the geometry drop down so that my materials show on all faces of the object.

I then dragged in a light and placed it under my gazebo, grabbing the element from the lights tab. By adjusting the intensity i can make this light brighter or dimmer, and i can also change the colour of the light by using the colour wheel next to the colour tab.

Nodes -

To make the light turn on and off when i enter the gazebo, i must utilize something called nodes. To do this i must first open the level blueprint, right click and select actor that being the point light, then set visibility and then click new visibility. Once i have done this, i connect this to on actor begin overlap and duplicate all of the script so far. On the duplicated one turn off the visibility, and connect on actor end overlap. This will create a light switch, the screenshot below better displays this process and the subsequent result.

Importing something from Maya to Unreal -

This section is probably the most important thing to learn in regards to our building alliances project, it will allow me to take my models that i made in Maya, and open them in Unreal. First off we need to start in Maya to make sure our models are scaled correctly, Open the Display tab in Maya then select the Grid [grid settings which is the icon beside it] this will bring up the grid settings menu. We need to change the variables, in order, to these 1000, 100, and 1. [As seen below] This will make your model very tiny, which all you need to do is scale it up to be visible, and make sure it is centered in the grid correctly. Then, delete the history, and export as an FBX.

Switching over to Unreal, Select the file tab, then press import to level, selecting your model and pressing the content folder, once you are happy, press import and your model should appear in the scene for you to edit and place. In the example below, i imported a simple toroid shape just to show how this will look.

Lightswitch task -

This is the result of the independent Light switch task for this lesson, I followed the tutorial on the powerpoint and whilst i did have some trouble with this, i eventually got it to work. This can be very useful for creating working light switches to toggle on and off a light source, and can also be used to create several light switches for different light sources. Below is the script i used to create this effect.