Book Image

3D Game Design with Unreal Engine 4 and Blender

By : Jessica Plowman
Book Image

3D Game Design with Unreal Engine 4 and Blender

By: Jessica Plowman

Overview of this book

Unreal Engine 4 now has support for Blender, which was not available in earlier versions. This has opened up new possibilities and that is where this book comes in. This is the first book in the market combining these two powerful game and graphic engines. Readers will build an amazing high-level game environment with UE4 and will show them how to use the power of Blender 3D to create stunning animations and 3D effects for their game. This book will start with creating levels, 3D assets for the game, game progression, light and environment control, animation, and so on. Then it will teach readers to add amazing visual effects to their game by applying rendering, lighting, rigging, and compositing techniques in Blender. Finally, readers will learn how to smoothly transfer blender files to UE4 and animate the game assets. Each chapter will add complexities to the game environment.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
3D Game Design with Unreal Engine 4 and Blender
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Whiteboxing a level for better asset creation


Back in Chapter 2, Starting Our First Project, we used a method called whiteboxing to construct a mockup of our level. There are two reasons for this. First, we want to create a simple mock up for testing purposes with our target player base. Second, we want to get a good idea of how large to build our custom game assets, as well as where to put them. Through this process we quickly end up with a working prototype. For this level, we will be doing the same thing but we will also be paying attention to where we want the player to go and how they get there. This means using blocking volumes.

Blocking volumes are essentially invisible walls in your level. Designers use them to make sure players don't get stuck in certain parts of the level and to ensure that players don't just jump over a railing and miss an important scripted event. In our case, we want the player to not be able to fall into the space station's docking area or just jump over the...