Alföðr - Development Diary: Week 2

Hi there

This is the second development blog for my final year project.

for anyone starting the reading from here or just needs a refresher my project is a piece of technical level design based off the TV show 'Vikings'. It is being created though the use of UE4 and Quixel Megascans. I will also be relying on the Epic games store for other things too.

In the last post I mentioned having struggles with software which was causing my progress to be stalled. As of this week I am now in the middle of getting this issue resolved which means i should be able to get started on the asset implementation this following week.

as for what I have done this week. I focused all my time on looking for and creating height maps for my level. I tried a few different ways around this such as getting a top down image of a part of Iceland, putting the image in Photoshop, creating a duplicate image and changing the colour to black and white, then going into the setting to increase the blurriness of the image and finally darken and lighten the areas i want raised and lowered. Due to Photoshop also having a 3D tool i could so what it would look like before I put it into Maya for the final steps. I liked how it looked but I decided on a height map to was created using a proper tool.

Here is a few examples of the height maps I experimented with;

This image is the actual height map of where they filmed to scene at the waterfall in the show 'Vikings'

I settled on the bottom image as the height map I was going to use.

My the first thing I had to do was to come up with a pathway for the character to follow. I had 4 different options and two different destinations.

The first route was straight across from one end of the map to the other side. This was the first pathway I came up with but decided to see if I could see anything better that would lead the player on more of a journey.

The next Iteration had the player following the same pathway as the first one but steering off to the left, across the land all the way to the bottom corner.

I decided to go with the second option as the flow around the mountains feels a lot more natural and the corner already has a start of a water fall structure i can build off.

I then went on to add a starter material onto the landscape to get an idea of colour on the land then got to work editing the landscape. I added a cube with a water material on it to simulate the water around the island and used that to create some puddles. I also started to edit the mountains at the start of the level to look more natural to look at.

Once I had an entrance made i noticed that you could see over the sides of the map, I could have just blocked this off with assets within the level that are strategically place but I chose to extend the level outwards to make it seem like the mountains don't just cut off randomly.

Lastly I found a Model I was happy at having my character as. I will be experimenting with different animations for the character and also editing the head off and replacing it with a camera for a first person experience

This week will all be about carrying on editing my landscape and hopefully get some assets and the master material created depending on if I get the software in time.