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

Using Blender's suite of animation tools


Time to bring the Artifact to life! Good animation can breathe character and vitality into any object. Many beginning animators start with the 12 Basic Principles of Animation originally written by Disney animators Ollie Johnston and Frank Thomas and I highly recommend checking them out. What we will be looking at for the Artifact is basic mechanical animation. Our pistons will move and our gear will rotate. However, I would encourage you to read up on the basics and apply what you've learned later on.

Just like we did earlier when we practiced with the cube, we are going to create some keyframes, but in this case, we will be moving the bones we created and not the pieces of the Artifact itself. The result will be a game asset that we can trigger to open within Unreal:

Manipulate the bones by using the Armature group in the Scene Outliner

Using Pose mode, let's move the Artifact into the closed position:

  1. To make things easier, select your Armature in...