This project was the result of a small competition within the Game Development Society club at my university. The topic was “Adventures”.
Some ideas were thrown around in my mind at the beginning, but one thing was certain: I wanted to make an environment involving snow mountains. I usually would have looked for any asset packs I have in my library to save me time on making the level as I primarily am a lighting artist. But later on, the same day, I decided to make the level myself as it would also help me get better at designing environments.
The initial scene I had in my mind was a man walking on a small path between snowy mountains during dawn, in trekking attire, representing adventure. This project took me around 2-3 days to finish.
Here’s a reference image of it:
Reference: Go on a magical winter hike without hating every step | Popular Science (popsci.com)
As I was finished making the base of the level, the next step for me was to find a character that was suitable for this scene. As I was scouring Mixamo and Epic Games Marketplace for free characters, I stumbled upon the Paragon characters, which are free, and come with animations. So, I chose a character which can fit the theme “adventure” the best they can.
This is the character I decided to go with:
Paragon: Gadget in Epic Content - UE Marketplace (unrealengine.com)
Even though the character was good, they did not fit the environment that I was going for, therefore, I decided to change the environment to a night setting to give some sort of a survival adventure vibe to the environment. This way, I was able to utilise the animations that came with the character.
Learnt about sockets to add objects such as static meshes or lights to the character’s rig in Unreal Engine. I used this so I could attach the spotlight to the drone/ball thing of the character so the spotlight would move along with the bot.
Making simple snow VFX using Niagara system in Unreal Engine following the tutorial shown here, but unfortunately, i could not get the blizzard effect going as shown in this video as I had problems with the spline code.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=31vIBODqhhk&feature=shares
Therefore, I decided to just change the coordinates of the basic snow and increased their spawn count and speed to make it look like a blizzard for my scene.
This video is the timelapse video of my workflow for this project: (Just a warning that my recording software messed up while recording my timelapse, so if you have epilepsy, be warned).