This game is about flying around as a bird in various environments, exploring the world!

Flight game

fablefox

Finally got it working today! I kept messing around in blender and I remembered that you can link/transfer data from one object to another, so I thought maybe I could transfer the UVs from the instanced to all the planes on the entire vegetation. It didn't work when all the planes were joined together, but I was able to separate every plane into all separate objects, then I transferred the UVs from the instanced to every single object I separated; I lastly just joined it all together and boom, all the UVs joined correctly and it just worked! There's gotta be a way to set this up in geometry nodes, but I still have yet to figure out how to really do UV unwrapping stuff in geometry nodes, it doesn't seem very easy to do in geo nodes just yet. But this work around is pretty quick to do anyways, so it's not too bad. I think there may be a little shading issues in unreal with the vegetation, so Ill look into that tomorrow maybe. Honestly just really happy to have figured this out and actually have a somewhat "finished" product after working on this vegetation system for a bit now.

Hmm, so I went ahead and UV unwrapped the instanced mesh and then applied the geometry nodes (followed by re-optimizing and cleaning up the mesh as before). It seems that the geometry nodes don't carry over the instanced mesh's UVs after applying it all which is annoying. I tried reimporting it (just in case it actually did carry over) into unreal and still have issues with the textures not showing. I did check the materials and they do show up correctly on other meshes and surfaces, just not this one for some reason. A little bit frustrated that it still doesn't work, but hopefully tomorrow will be better. 🙏

Alright so I further reduced the poly count and fixed an "issue" (there was a lot of ivy geometry inside the house that wasn't being utilized), then got everything exported and added into my unreal scene. I attempted to try and put the materials onto the ivy to find that it wasn't showing up, realizing I didn't UV unwrap it at all. Although, I then forgot that the process of UV unwrapping this is a bit different than usual models since it's a texture being "tiled" onto many faces. I kind of forgot how to set that up, I think I just have to have a single face for the entire mesh be on the UV unwrap? But I can't seem to figure that out. I remember doing this for my tree leaves, but I can't find the video anywhere. Ill figure it out soon though.

Finished up the texturing on the both multi and single leaf textures! Here's an old vs new of how my leaves looked before I went and hand textured them in substance. Most of the current noticeable changes is with the colors, but I'm hoping once I figure out all the normals for the vegetation, the lighting should hopefully look a bit better with the newer version since I baked them with leaf-like normals instead of the old version of being fully flat.

Alright so here's what I got so far for the multi leaf version of my vegetation normals. It may look like all I did was copy/paste the same leaf and have yet to texture in substance, but I had severe baking problems I've been fixing for the past 2 hours almost!

worked on improving the leaf texture some more. I decided to actually model and sculpt out the leaf instead of just using a flat texture (so I could get baked normals and make have better colors). I then went into substance to do the baking and here's what I got so far. The normals baked quite nicely considering this is a flat plane and has no actual thickness. Ill likely make a second variant to this with multiple smaller leaves on a single plane.

So I got some good work done on my ivy generator, but I made the big mistake of not saving often enough, and my project just went not responding, so may lose all my progress 🙃. So I'm just going to leave blender here until it (hopefully 🙏 ) comes back and allows me to save. Ahh man I love blender!

Started trying to implement some of the tips that Michael had mentioned earlier. The normals should now be facing in the direction of the points created from the house geometry (which is basically the normal direction of the geometry itself at that point),. The issue is that the generation gives it a bad look since the leaves are presented at 90 degrees at the corners and edges very obviously, and not more realistically spread. I'm assuming the second portion (the clustered leaves that aren't oriented with house normals) would help alleviate this issue, but I still have the problem of a high tri count if I try to bring up the density enough to make it look not bad. I also noticed some z-fighting issues Ill have to fix on some of the generated vegetation. I wonder if it'd be easier to just generate the entire mesh and then use the method I used for my tree and grass foliage (using a normal edit modifier) to create the upward normals)

Here's how my slightly more "optimized" generator is looking. I created a few different textures and a few different plane shapes to create some variability. I also cleaned up my node system a bit. Currently this is sitting at around 6-7k tris, which probably is still a bit higher than I want, although the nice thing is that the geometry node system will make the creation of LODs really easy.

Worked on Optimizing my vegetation setup today! I was originally just going to make a reduced poly leaf/ivy model to use instead of my 21 poly one I'm currently using, but I then just realized I could use the same method I did for the trees I made in the past; I can just create a plane or two and use a leaf texture for the alpha to create basically the same look of a modeled leaf but with much less poly count. It doesn't look that great on the house currently, but once I change some of my geometry nodes to better suite the new poly vegetation, I should look pretty decent. The left was the 21 poly count one I've been using and the right is using 2 planes (similarly used for tree leaves) with textures on them to look leafy.

This is definitely a little overkill on how the ivy/moss would cover the house, but I just wanted to see more clearly how it'd look. So I painted the weights on most of the beams and on some of the roof. I also added some chained ivy coming from the chimney to see how easily my system for that works. It's a little annoying to use (mostly because my scene was laggin due to unoptimized vegetation and overvalued density of the vegetation. But overall it's a pretty cool little system I got here.

Worked more on the vegetation generator today. I was actually able to figure out how to scale on the normal direction through geometry nodes after researching it a bit more. I used noise to control the scale so there was added depth to the vegetation on the surfaces. I also made use of a nice feature in blender of drawing curves to easily draw vine shapes if I want to. I was also working on a slightly altered version of my generation; I would generate it along the surface based on a noise, then use the weight painting to alter it. https://imgur.com/cYncgo4

Nothing much to show today, I've just been working more on the ivy/moss generation geometry node system. I want to add some noise to the vegetation that will change how far it "pops out" of the surface. Basically I want to extrude it out based on a noise value to create variety, but I'm not actually going to extrude it, I just want to change the length values of the vegetation itself. I originally was scaling it to create the effect, but I realized after applying the vegetation to different sides (such as the left or right), then axis would change, resulting in strange scalings. So I'm instead thinking of trying to mostly make the vegetation through geo nodes, and then I can just reference a length value that won't be affected by axis direction. I also thought about trying to scale based off the normal direction of the points that were used to instance the vegetation, but I couldn't get that working.

Worked on the Moss/Ivy Generator today. I found that using a weight painting approach would allow me to more easily create a gradient effect on the vegetation if I wanted to instead of straight vertex painting. With this setup I have two weight painting groups, one for the main moss/ivy and another for the moss chain that hangs across/over the mesh. It was honestly really simple to setup, so I may look for a more automated approach to making the generation process faster and easier when providing it objects to populate, maybe using some sort of noise with extra focus on edges or something, idk. https://imgur.com/3MlBfKA

Fixed some issues and did some further cleaning up on my procedural modeling bridge system! There was a strange issue that caused the top and bottom ropes to not follow the beams and planks as the bridge was widened, but it's all fixed now. I've also been messing around with other random procedural stuff late last night; I started working on a plant/moss/ivy procedural generator. I want to see if I can reference an object, then based on maybe painted vertex colors, put some vegetation (like moss, ivy, or vines) onto the the object. I could use this for my game so I can add some vegetation onto the buildings, statues, and bridges. Hopefully it won't be too hard to make something like this, it seems pretty doable so I thought I'd try it!

Nothing much to show for today. I was mostly working on cleaning up my procedural bridge geometry nodes up and adding some frames (comment boxes) to help it look a bit cleaner and easier to see. I also started trying to work on adding some extra position options for the bridge so that you can sway it into the y and z directions (so that you can turn it left/right and up/down). It's still a WIP, I made it a bit difficult to add that feature in due to how I created the bridge, so I'm having to redo a few things. But I'm pretty happy with it either way, it's been quite enjoyable doing this procedural modeling tbh. I kinda want to try making a procedural model in houdini (free) just for the fun of it.

I was able to fix the weird issue with some boards being darker than others. I knew it wasn't any AO/normal issue because nothing changed with the darkening when I enabled/disabled the AO/normals. I created a whole new material (not an instance of a master material) and it just suddenly worked. It seemed my master material was glitched; I just changed the default texture for the ORM parameter (occlusion roughness metallic texture) and it suddenly fixed it, I'm assuming it just needed to be updated or something? idk very strange but it's fixed now. I also did some more work on my procedural bridge, I found I can actually procedurally generate the ID map for the texturing process which is absolutely amazing! I also have been trying to figure out how to do it for UV unwrapping, but I can't get it to work. There's a node for UV unwrapping in the geometry nodes, but it just doesn't seem to work for me. This bridge I made I did the UVing all by hand (but I'm used to doing it this way anyways). Man I wish Houdini was (fully) free 😦 . Since I've been looking into procedural modeling, I've come across how amazing houdini really is (look at project titan in hourdini for some really cool procedural modeling stuff), it's insane.

Finished up the texturing for the bridge and got it imported into unreal. For some reason, some of the wooden boards are darker than others (independent from the sun or model's position/rotation). It doesn't seem to be related to my material information either, so it must be related to either unreal or the mesh itself, although substance didn't show anything strange when I imported it into there. It's not really a big deal either way, but it'd like to figure out why it's happening.

Finished up the procedural model today, and UV unwrapped, ID Mapped, and started texturing it as well! I used my barrel wood material I made a while ago as a base and I'm just messing with the colors and values until I get something I like. Once I have the materials all made into smart materials in substance, the workflow between using my procedural model to texturing it will be even smoother/easier, ah procedural is so great!

I finally did it! @Michael I finally sat down, got into blender (and youtube) and worked on my first procedural model! I worked on this for nearly the entire day today, but I'm really happy with how it's turning out (although it's not finished just yet). It's so amazing how I can just easily change all the settings of the model after it's all setup with the nodes, it feels sooo soo good. https://imgur.com/ssflDL2

Working on a bridge model today, I thought it'd be cool to have some of these bridges across some of the ravines in my game.

Worked more on the main menu today! Fixed the AO issue I was having yesterday, added a nice fade when opening the menu, and added some wind particles near the windmill.

Focused on improving the main menu today! Duplicated my main scene and altered it a bit for the background to my main menu. Also cleaned up the UI text (still don't have a game name, hopefully soon). It's still a WIP, but I think it looks a lot better than before. Also the weird AO issues on the house will be getting fixed, it's just a temporary problem right now.

Finished up the hat today! The AO on the hat for some reason is a bit off and is causing some dark spots in undesired areas, but other than that it looks pretty nice. I also spent a good bit of time with the gpu profiler in unreal to optimize and lower the ms on some of the more costly operations being done. Shadows were causing a lot of the hits to ms, mainly shadows on the landscape and grass, and disabling them caused little to no difference in visuals. One day I will get my game fully optimized, but it does make it hard to realize fps and optimization issues when your PC is a bit too strong 🙃. I need to run this on an old 10 year old Toshiba laptop and really see how terribly optimized it is.

Alright so I ended up picking the pink flower, I think it fits my character the best out of the three hats, but I still may go back and work on a second or third flower hat in the future. Did the UV unwrapping and started on texturing it in substance. Not exactly sure what a petal texture should look like, but some line textures along the petals looks nice.

Getting back to working on some more nature-themed hats! Here's some WIP flower hats I've made; I had a few different ideas for the flower design, so I decided to just make all three designs and then pick the best out of the three. Still not sure which one Ill probably go with, I like/dislike all of them in different ways.

Good news guys, I was able to fix the shadow issue I've been having for quite a while now! After hours of research and messing with various settings, I found the culprits of the issue: Virtual Shadow Maps and low Shadow Bias on my lights in the scene. Right after I switched from virtual to regular, the weird flickering shadow glitch went away, and all that remained were some lines on the shadows. Increasing the shadow bias on my directional lights then was able to fix the issue of the static lines showing up on the shadow. Very happy I was able to finally fix this!

Finished up the Mushroom hat today! I would have started a new hat, but I noticed this weird rendering/lighting issue (which seems much more prevalent with this hat than others). It almost seems like there's z-fighting going on, but I've checked and saw nothing there. It also doesn't seem to be related to the normals, so I'm assuming it's something related to my lighting/rendering in the game (since I do notice this issue at a reduced amount with other models). Been trying to figure out a fix for a while now and have yet to find the answer.

Finishing up on the mushroom hat texturing today. I found out about a pretty nice feature inside substance painter that allows you to convert height information into normal information, so I can paint in details, change the height, and then convert it into the normals without having to use a separate height map or anything.

Started working on a new hat today, I thought of making some nature themed hats (inspired by hats from Kena: Bridge of spirits. Amazing game btw). So my first nature hat is going to be a mushroom hat! It's still got a while left to go on texturing but It's not looking too bad so far.

Pretty productive day today, I was able to fix all the problems I had with my spawning system blueprint and I setup a weighted random method for controlling each type of NPC and how often they should get spawned. I think the system is pretty much done now, all that's left is adding a check in place to make sure that NPCs don't spawn inside structures or models on accident.

Nothing to show for today, just been working on the NPC spawning system blueprint I started yesterday. I did fix the problem with the NPCs seemingly not recognizing the nav mesh. It was actually that auto possessing AI by default is only set to pawns placed in the world, not spawned as well.  I did run into another issue however, which was that the bounding box wasn't flat to the landscape (since it's bumpy and has slopes and stuff), which made certain NPCs get spawned into the ground or in the air. To fix that I called a line trace (raycast) from the spawn position down (on the Z) into the ground to find where a spawn point would be that's actually on the ground. Now just the last issue is that the NPCs are spawned and animating, but aren't actually moving around currently.

Got the Safari Hat finished and the lighting issues seem somewhat resolved from yesterday! I decided that the glasses didn't really fit with the bear hat as much as it does with the safari one, so I switched that around. Also I started working on a blueprint for placing the little dudes based on a box area to help with setting up some randomization and make it easier to add additional hats/NPCs without having to hand place every single one. Only issue I have so far is that the NPCs don't seem to recognize the nav mesh if they spawn on play. It also doesn't seem I can spawn them in using the construction script (runs before play) because it doesn't allow the use of the SpawnActor Node.  https://imgur.com/7D145cd

Got finished up on texturing the hat and glasses and put it into the engine! Due to some lighting issues (I'm working on), I couldn't show it in game, but here's it in the editor! I also started on a new safari hat!

Alright so today I uv-unwrapped the hat I made yesterday and textured it up in substance painter! Thought maybe going with a fabric texture instead of a basic smooth texture would look a bit better.

Today was mostly just messing around in blender to come up with different things I could put on my NPCs to add variety and differentiate them. I created some glasses and started working on a new hat idea I got from googling around. Not sure if the hat fits the game at all, but I think it definitely fits the look of the little dude.

Got the rain ripples to display correctly today! Unfortunately I don't think Ill be keeping the ripples in game; they just aren't noticeable enough to the player to be worth it. But still, I was able to learn something new, so I'm fine with that! I also worked on a particle material for my rain particle effect (not the ripples but the rain falling) and added some translucency and motion blur to them. https://imgur.com/UBU1jvQ

So didn't get too much done tonight, a bit tired from quite a long day 😅  (and weekend for that matter). I tried to use my material water ripples in my landscape material and show both the normals and add some color over the ripples on the landscape to help see them better. But as you can see, it's not exactly working as planned lol, normals I think are fine but the colors are uh, a bit off to say the least. Still I thought it was interesting enough to show here, quite a strange effect. I put a spoiler on the clip in case of issues with flashing colors and stuff.||https://imgur.com/BBTqqOA||

Finished up the rain ripple material today! Main difference between yesterday's and today's version is now the rain ripples will overlap each other which is more realistic. However, the effect doesn't show up that well on the landscape material yet, so I need to work on strengthening the effect to more clearly show up in game.

Worked more on the rain ripple effect today, nearly finished up with it! Just gotta get some overlapping/blending to happen as it would be in real life, which requires a bit of material functioning. Also I've been looking more into that whole noise issue, from what I can understand it doesn't seem to be any sort of screenspace effect issue, but possibly an ambient occlusion issue? Still need to do more research but I think that's the culprit for the noisiness.

So first thing I worked on today was the AI some more. I saw that some of the AIs were hitting into each other and causing some minor issues, so I found out about another AIController that Unreal has called "DetourCrowdAIController", which apparently helps with stopping AI from bumping into each other. I also decided to turn off collisions between AIs so that they wouldn't get stuck just in case. Additionally, I thought it would be pretty cool to add some emission glow to the windows when it gets dark to simulate some sort of lights being turned on in the houses. Although, I just realized that these houses probably wouldn't have electricity, so I may need to turn down that emission to simulate closer to candle/torch lighting 😅. Lastly I started working on the rain material a bit to try to get some ripples showing up on wet areas while it's raining, still a work in progress for that. https://imgur.com/7ChpYIn

Today I finished up modeling and texturing my improved top hat and figured out the issue I was having with the blendspaces which was causing no blending to happen between the walking and idle animations. In my animation blueprint, I used a normal clamp node for the velocity values instead of using a very nifty node called the "Map Ranged Clamp". This basically takes in two ranges and clamps it within the second range but the same ratio as the first range. https://imgur.com/MLyg5jr

Today I worked on my AI dudes some more. First I messed with the rotation settings and made it much less snappy and more smooth on rotating when moving from place to place. I still need to get the animation blending worked on more to get a more smooth stopping animation when the AI is about to reach the destination. I also got started on an actual hat for the AIs, first one will be a better top hat than what I have now basically. https://imgur.com/mfFlOeE

Today I worked on adding some NPCs to my mountain level and experimenting with hats through skeletal meshes and parent sockets! So I want to start adding some actual NPCs to my little village since it feels a bit strange being so empty. This was my first NPC I made, but not for sure if they look that good or fit the area well. The AI behavior also still needs a good bit of work as well. I also wanted to give my NPCs in my game some variation so I wanted to change things like their colors, size, and add some hats to give variety to them! The hat I have right now is just for testing purposes only, Ill work on making some good hat models in the future. I think Ill need to go with having different blueprints for each variation in order to get the working. https://imgur.com/JoIwCA8

Spent most of today trying to finish up my portfolio and get good screenshots from my various projects I've worked on! Still needs a bit more work but nearly finished up! I also got the shader blend based on height finished up in my game, not sure how I feel about it though, seems both cool and also a little weird at the same time to switch between two shaders depending on height. Here's what it looks like: https://imgur.com/jlJvyM4

I think I found a way to fix my issue with the post processing volume not blending correctly. Instead of trying to blend using a post process volume, I figured out I could just lerp between the cell shader and the normal shader within the material itself, then use a material parameter collection to reference a scalar for the alpha on the lerp. Then I just need to lerp it between various height values so when the player is above the clouds the cellshader is decreased or fully off, transitioned smoothly, and switched to normal shading.   https://imgur.com/yREijCg

Nothing to show for today, mostly just messing with the volumetric settings and cloud material and reading the unreal documentation to make the clouds more optimized and less expensive to use. I've realized I may need to take off the cell shader I've been using for the past few months since it has strange interactions when looking at the clouds from above. I tried to have a post process blend so that the player would phase in/out of it smoothly when above or below the clouds, but my cell shader post processing instead either goes fully on or fully off, no blending has worked so far. Maybe I just need to do more research and look through pages of forum posts to find the answer.

Alright so today I tried for quite a while to figure out the rest of the ray marching cloud stuff. Currently I'm just stuck at it, it's hard finding much information that isn't too high level for me to understand with cloud ray marching. I've tried with looking at Sebastian Lague's wonderful video on ray marching clouds, but have had issues doing the same thing in unreal. I've also tried reading some articles (such as one from the legend himself, Ryan Brucks), but still no success. I'm going to try to instead look into and study how Unreal's volumetric cloud material is setup and alter that slightly (along with some values) to try to get what I want for clouds. Here's how the volumetric clouds look so far without much changes from the standard version: https://imgur.com/YA46t5M

Worked more on music for the game today! Not even sure what the music will be used for (specific level, main menu, etc), but I think it's pretty nice enough to go somewhere in my game. This is a rough draft, so to speak, of this piece so it's not finalized yet. Unfortunately since I recorded this in one run on my piano instead of piece by piece (like I usually do), and a decent amount of this was improv, redoing this may change it up slightly. I do have the midi recorded from it so I still can move around/edit notes which helps in post recording. I also may even look into adding additional instruments (through VSTs) to add more to this song, but that'll need some experimenting. Curious to see what you guys think of it!

Nothing to show for today, just worked on quite a bit of music stuff for my game, thought I'd take a short break on the HLSL stuff for a day or two. Still lots of experimenting and messing around with various chords and melodies on my piano until I get something I really like together. I think I'm starting to get somewhere with it though, hopefully Ill have a full song to show off soon.

Did some more HLSL stuff today! Seems the first step to getting my clouds done is creating a 3D noise generator. I've started to try and get a 3D voronoi noise generator written in HLSL, although I don't think it's fully working just yet. But the one thing I really like so far about HLSL (well shader stuff in general) is even if I mess up somewhere, the undesired effect still looks cool regardless lol. I also was able to figure out how to create colors for each separate shape, just had to multiply their equations with the colors and then add both together. First video will show the separated colors along with the blending I did yesterday, looks really nice with separated colors. The second video will be the unintentional effect of my voronoi noise put into a color.

Alright so I'm attempting to learn how to do raymarching, and in doing that I'm also learning how to code in HLSL within unreal. May not seem like much, but this sphere took almost 2 hours of reading, troubleshooting, and writing HLSL. The colors shown on the sphere are estimated normals. Hopefully tomorrow I'll get to actually raymarching stuff. Still, pretty cool learning HLSL stuff. Didn't even know you could really write that within unreal engine.

Today I created a wind blueprint in order to give the player a boost when entering the wind stream. I may need to add some additional particle effect so the player is better indicated of the speed boost during the wind stream, but an audio sound will also help with that once I get to adding that. Also I finally figured out the issue with why I couldn't populate any trees on top of the mountain: there was a cap set for max height in foliage painting that was lower than the height of the mountain area I was attempting to paint the trees at. Just increased it and boom started working! https://imgur.com/wYk1VWA

Finally got the wind mostly figured out, I had to do some research on finding where certain niagara settings went from switching to UE5 from UE4. It's not finished, I want to find a way to maybe add a few random occasional swirls to the wind (stylized effect), but not for sure how Ill approach that just yet. The waviness of the wind is from the curl force, but actually making the wind go 360 swirl will be...interesting to try and achieve.

Nothing to show for today, but I worked more on my music theme for my game (mainly in the experimentation phase for finding what works), and I got started on creating some visual wind effects inside unreal (for weather/player interaction). I think I'm going to go with a stylized wind effect through Niagara, but I'm still working on it so nothing much to show with that.

Wasn't able to do too much today, I didn't have access to my PC for most of the day so I spent it on creating a roadmap and planning out exactly what I want to accomplish and when I want to release the game (not fully finished but more as an initial release version). I think I wanna finish around december, and that should give me enough time to finish up what I want to do. My project is starting to cause a little burn out since I've worked on it for nearly a year now, but I don't want to rush it either since I want to make a decent game (also releasing it will give me a break, but I'll probably continue to work on it after december, just less and focus on other projects more).

Today I created separate water noise textures to correspond with each landscape texture I have (so one for grass, another for stone, another for dirt/sand, etc.) Now I can change how the water puddles look depending on what surface the water is on. Additionally I was messing around a bunch with the post process settings, still needs some work but I think I can make some good use of it for creating a more darkened, gloomy rain effect. I still need some clouds though, pretty strange to have rain with a full clear sky. https://imgur.com/nxqoKRq

More work on the rain stuff. Tweaked some of the settings for the rain particles and attached it to the player, not about to add 100k particles trying to add rain to the entire map lol, plus it'll have the same visual effect anyways. I also got started on adding rain puddles, but I still need to work on messing with the tiling and noise textures to get it looking a bit better. Also I think I should have different tiling/noise textures for specific surfaces, since it looks a bit strange having those rain blobs on the sides of mountains. https://imgur.com/QFGe7iV

Got started on creating some rain for a weather system! Still needs some work to look like actual rain, I'll probably create some special material to go along with this as well. The harder part is figuring out the rain puddle effect, but I have some ideas on how that may work. I also started messing around with making some music themes for my level here, but it's far from being presentable yet.

Worked on fixing some issues with my day/night cycle today. It wasn't switching off the space skybox after a full cycle and the directional light for night (the moon/sky light) was glitching out for some reason. Seemed to get both of those somewhat fixed, although still there's some strange lighting glitches happening (maybe because having a directional light rotating under the map isn't good practice?). I should be pretty close to getting then day/night cycle in a somewhat working state and moving on to the next thing on my trello for the game. One thing I really wanted to try and do was a weather system, but I have a feeling that'll be quite hard to accomplish. Still having rain, wind, and even snow would be super cool! Also I wanna get started on developing some music for my level too!

A bit of a shorter day today for gamedev, I'm pretty busy today. I started creating a better transition for the day to night sky using a timeline connected to the opacity of the space skybox material. I also added in a directional light for the moon so it didn't go pitch black in the scene when the original directional light (sun) went under the world. Still needs lots of work in the exposure/sky brightness and some value tweaking on the transition, but it looks better than yesterday. Hopefully I'll have some time late tonight to work on this more. https://imgur.com/xbh7MRR

So I finally got somewhere with adding the night sky into the day/night cycle in unreal. So what I decided to do is add a scalar value for the opacity of my skybox material in my skybox material parameter collection. Then depending on the angle of the sun I could change it to night (more smoothly transitioned than shown, this is just for testing it out). My current issue is that once the sun (directional light) goes too far rotated, it takes out all the lighting in the scene, so I need to then have it rotate backwards back towards the start, and the skybox should keep the sun hidden (or even better idea, add in a moon that provides light). https://imgur.com/MIw1qyR

Worked on a few things today. First I was looking into figuring out how to add my space skybox into my main scene (mountain scene) so when the sun goes down, the sky switches to that space skybox. Still need to do more research on figuring that out. I also created a simple main menu (as shown), but far from finished and still needs a level select and UI art made for it. I decided I also wanted to get a bit of work done on the fullstack project, so I started designing the layout of another room we need done.

Tonight I worked on adding a day/night cycle to my game! Now this is much faster than it would normally be, but I had it faster just so you could more easily see the effect. As the sun moves it does seem to have some flickering "effect", not sure if that's intentional in the settings or if moving it just causes that. Honestly this cycle setup was pretty simple and easy to create, but today was pretty busy so I didn't have a whole bunch of time to work on stuff. Plus I did spend a good while earlier today finishing my render and editing it. https://imgur.com/DNuFUzL

Got the shed finished up and put into the scene! Had some weird z-fighting issues and some normals were flipped incorrectly. But I was able to reimport everything without having to redo the textures since I didn't need to re-unwrap anything.

Didn't have much time today, but I was able to get most of the texturing done on the shed. Just a bit more to finish up then I can put it in game.

So fixing the baking problems took quite a bit longer than I expected (about an hour), but I finally was able to get it baked with minimal issues now. My UV map was all messed up because of some issues with the roof tiles (these were old roof tiles from months ago that I forgot to fix). Also I forgot to put in the walls on my high poly so it caused some weird artifacts. I just took off those baked areas, hopefully it won't really matter much once I texture it up, maybe Ill just hand paint in some AO or something for the walls. I would just add my walls to the high poly version, but my blender nearly crashes if I try to do much with the high poly right now, plus it takes like 30 minutes to export it.

Today I finished up the sculpting for the shed and moved on to texturing/baking. Unfortunately I wasn't able to get started on texturing just yet because I'm having some baking issues, but I should be able to get them all fixed here soon.

Finished the ID mapping and nearly finished the sculpting, then once that's done it's texturing time!

Since the shed is pretty simple, I was able to finish it up and start UV unwrapping and ID mapping (nothing much new visually unfortunately to showoff). Hopefully later tonight or tomorrow I can get the texture work started on that.

Got started on a shed model for my game. As I was looking at my floating rocks, I noticed that my selection of buildings isn't very large and will start to be a bit repetitive if I put the same buildings everywhere. So I wanted to get on another model, this time a shed. It should be pretty simple and won't take more than a few days to complete hopefully.

Worked more on the floating rocks today. Added some more textures to it and added some additional models on the top of it. I still think something is missing, maybe some sort of VFX or magical looking stuff that can make it look a bit cooler and give some reason behind it's floating nature. https://imgur.com/SuwyA0I

Didn't get much done today, going to be pretty busy tonight. But I wanted to experiment with adding some floating rock things inside the mountain level in unreal and see how that looks. So far I just modeled and added some textures to them, but Ill populate them with stuff on there tomorrow and see how it looks flying around. Seems cool in theory to have, but they may just look weird or out of place in actual gameplay.

Finished up the statue and the texturing. I decided to just use the same material for my first statue and change a few parameters a bit to get the texture made. I think it's alright, but I do see some weird lighting issues, but I think that's related to my shader possibly.

Not much to show for today. Finished up on UV unwrapping my statue, and I also did a lot of research/studying on networking related stuff for unreal.

Made a bunch of small additions/revisions. Added some extra pieces on the helmet, slightly changed up the hilt of the sword,  added some extra "protection" on the arms, and slightly changed up the boots. Pretty close to finishing this up and moving on to UV unwrapping, ID mapping, and then texturing. Luckily the unwrapping should be a bit easier since I used some statue parts from my previously UV unwrapped statue, so Ill just have to fill in a few areas.

Worked more on the statue. Slightly changed the sword with increasing it's size and adding a small indent down the middle. Also I started the armor, but I have mixed feelings about it. I may scratch it or continue to try and get it looking better, not sure yet. But again this statue will be much smaller so it's not all that important anyways.

Working more on the statue. So I ended up spending quite a long time on those hands and trying to get them looking better. Definitely got the right hand looking a bit better, left hand is eh, but I may just leave it at this point since it's not going to be noticeable much by the player anyways. This helmet is from my previous statue, still deciding if Ill keep it or change it up a bit for this one. I thought since this statue is in the same region as my larger one, the same helmet would likely make sense. The cape looks a bit weird now, but I think when I get armor and all that on the statue it'll look less off.

Currently working on a new statue, this one is going to be a much smaller one than my first one and will go somewhere in my village in unreal. The fingers are still a work in progress, they are pretty off looking. Also I may or may not keep the sword, may replace with a spear or some other weapon instead.

Finished working on the sticks! Since the models are pretty simple, UV unwrapping and texturing was pretty quick to do. I tried to use the foliage system in unreal to make placing sticks around easier, but for some reason it wouldn't let me paint them, ill have to do some research on that. So I've just been hand placing them, which isn't that bad anyways since the player won't be seeing them in many places in the scene.

Didn't do much today, was pretty busy. But I was able to work on a few stick models that I can just lay around in random places on the ground/against buildings and on crates/barrels. Ill probably create a couple more just to have a good variety of stick models in the game.

Today I finished up the texturing for the well and put it in the scene! I think it turned out pretty good!

Started on the texturing for the well! Had some issues with baking, but after realizing I had a bunch of overlapping UVs, I fixed that and it seemed to fix the problem. Debating if I should slightly lighten the stone or not as well. It seems a bit dark, but it also shares similar shades of rock that are present in the scene already, so it makes more sense that way, it just seems a bit dark for the brighter wood and roof colors. Maybe once it's in game it'll become a bit brighter anyways.

Nothing really to show for today, just finished UV unwrapping and ID mapping the well model, so tomorrow Ill get started on texturing!

Finished up the high poly for the well. All that's left is finishing up the UV unwrap and ID mapping and then it's texturing!

Finished up the roof shingles today and got started on the wooden beams! Almost finished up on the high poly version of the well.

Half done with the roof sculpting! It's taking quite a bit longer than I thought to do, I guess I forgot how tedious sculpting roof shingles are. But I should be able to get this roof finished up by tomorrow.

Worked more on the sculpting for the well. Focused mainly on smaller parts of the well like the bucket, handle, and the wooden cylinder (the cylinder the rope is wrapped around). Ill be working on the roof next, and then finally I will work on the wooden beams and getting the grooves sculpted into it.

So for the well, I decided today to extrude the faces out to give the effect of offset cobblestone/brick for the base of the well. I think it adds much more to the overall look of the well, less flat and plain looking. Secondly, I started with making the high poly version and sculpted in the entire base of the well. It's coming along pretty well!

Worked on the rope and bucket today for the well. Again I wasn't able to work on this too much with finals, but tomorrow is my last finals test and then ill be freeeee 🥳 ...for a month or so. I think the rope definitely looks a bit off, so it'll most likely just take lots of messing around with until it actually looks "natural" and physically somewhat "realistic".

Worked more on the well today! Didn't have much time as I'm approaching finals but I was able to get the roofing, as well as start the whole bucket mechanism.

Started working on my next model for the village in my game, a nice stylized well! The proportions feel a bit off to me, but hopefully ill get have looking better after trial and error.

Got the rotation working on the windmill! Definitely adds a lot to the overall feeling of the village, and just makes it feel more alive (even though no actual NPCs are there...yet). I also had to redo part of the windmill again, this time the blue fabric was one-sided since the normals were only showing on the front side. So I had to duplicate it and flip the normals so it didn't disappear when you looked at it from the backside. The rotation also was a bit annoying to do since the pivot points weren't centered for the rotator or the center piece I have (even after centering them in blender), so I had to sorta cheat it by using an arrow component as the parent and put the rotator and center piece as the children and rotate it from that. But it works so I'm happy, although I do notice some little bit of lag, but that may have to do with a mixture my project being unoptimized, as well as just tabbing in and out of the engine as I had it running.

Today I had to actually redo parts of the windmill, since I didn't notice that the axle wouldn't technically make sense since it's square and it would overlap the opening. So I beveled it off a bit and reapplied the textures (which luckily since substance is so amazing, didn't cause any issues). After that I started working on programming in the windmill movement so it would rotate and all that. Hopefully Ill get that finished by tomorrow!

Finished up the back portion of the model and tweaked the walls and metal textures a bit, but I think I'm finally finished up with this texturing! Now all that's left is putting it into game and seeing if any issues come up (usually there's some roughness issue since I forgot to turn off or increase roughness of one of my sliders in substance). I think it came out pretty well, and matches the same themes as the houses in my village pretty well too!

Got some more work done on the windmill texturing. Had to also fix some weird normals that somehow were flipped for the high poly model (which due to baking the model, made it onto the low poly model for texturing). But I think it's looking pretty decent right now.

Today I finished up the ID mapping on the model and got started on texturing! Didn't have too much time to work on the texturing today, so there's still a bit to go before it's finished.

Not much to show for today, just worked on finishing up the UV mapping the windmill and got nearly finished up on ID mapping as well. Should be able to get started on texturing it in substance tomorrow!

Finished up the high poly version! I got the last few beams done and I decided to add some detailing on the wooden ladder steps as well. Now I just gotta finish up UV mapping and ID mapping.

Didn't have much time today to work on my windmill, but I got some more progress on finishing the beams. I only have one more section (about 4 beams) left before I'm basically finished with this high poly version. I should be able to get it done by tomorrow, so then I can focus on the texturing process!

Flight game

Dev Logs