The Dracula Level is finished! I'll post all those really nice screenshots towards the end of this blog post, but for now, we're moving on!

 Right now, I'm in the early concept stage of working on a First-Person Shooter level blockout. The game I decided on was Resident Evil: Village. I was lucky enough to find a really robust asset pack that contains all the features I need to make an accurate recreation of the game in Unreal Engine 5! Right now I am working on making a metrics gym and learning to integrate all the features of the asset pack within it as well as designing the overall map layout of the main level:

I tried to recreate the map as closely as I could to the style of the original game for the sake of clarity.

But for now, that's all that's new, so enjoy some screenshots from the finished Dracula level!

This week's assignment involves working closely with out artists in order to block out a level under certain aesthetic constraints. The group of artists I'm working with is designing a detective-style investigative puzzle game themed after Dracula with the visual style of the series: Arcane. I was extremely eager to start working on this project, and my mind immediately went to the Castlevania animated series in terms of aesthetic inspiration.

Because I'm obsessed with gothic architecture, castles, and the like, the first thing I did when drawing out my map was sketch a castle I then proceeded to work on for waaayy too long just because of how much fun it was (and its all aesthetic! only the bottom floor is playable!)

Below is the first rough pass at the castle exterior. I felt it looked too Disney-esque and decided to change the overall peak shapes

Current pass

Castle Interior

Back street city current pass

Not a long blog post this time around since its mainly in between projects!
Since last week, I have been touching up my project a bit further before submission. Specifically, I messed with lighting, composition, and post-processing to mimic the game further. Below is a final in-engine screenshot of the project!

Since then, I have moved on to a new project. Currently, I am tasked with creating a 3 area level based on a pre-existing narrative and style that our wonderful artists have worked hard to put together. 

I am working on the Dracula team for this project which is a noir-style puzzle investigation game with the art style of Arcane. I have been talking very closely with the artists in the past few days and am looking forward to the level we get to work on!

Since the last blog post, I have made significant progress in creating my level and learned a lot of different aspects about working in Unreal throughout the process. As I mentioned in my last post, I ended up being much more challenged by the level I chose than I initially intended. There were two aspects of the Hunter's Dream in Bloodborne that aesthetically oppose each other, and each carried its own challenges.

Firstly, there was the natural terrain. The garden outside the Hunter's Workshop carried with it many twists, turns, pathways, ramps, and steep elevations. This type of landscape was one I had never tried to make before. As mentioned in the last blog post, this was something I ended up overcoming with the use of the spline tools. Below is the current version of the garden/cemetery portion of the level, which I recently adjusted based on suggestions on its elevation.

Next was the workshop itself. I faced a lot of difficulty trying to decide just how much detail needed to be rendered for an appropriate blockout. The workshop is architecturally a gorgeous, complex structure based on Gothic chapels and has lots of vaulted ceilings, intricate spires, columns, archways, and more. While I knew that a lockout was not going to be a perfect recreation, I felt as if I should still try to create a strong silhouette that stands out against the skybox behind it. The majority of the building is made with duplicated wall structures and other blockmesh proxy assets made using the modeling tools provided by Unreal.

As it stands, the level is essentially complete, save for a few props and adjustments to scale and proportions here and there. This level has been extremely challenging, just as rewarding, and even more fun than I could have hoped for 

The level I chose to recreate is the Hunter's Dream from Bloodborne. The level serves as a hub for players to level up, purchase weapons, and sometimes progress the story. The area consists of a single building (The Hunter's Workshop) atop a graveyard hill, with the rest of the area consisting only of paths that go up and down the hill to various bits of in-game lore, shops, and gates. 

The aspect of the level that I have chosen to change is the hunter's workshop itself. I have decided to expand the house with a side expansion, a second-story loft/altar, a bell tower, and a backyard to the building. 

A struggle I had when starting on this level was that the majority of the space is winding paths that go up and down an uneven terrain. I initially approached this by trying to sculpt a terrain to fit the rough shape and pathways. This was a mistake. Trying to manually raise and lower terrain to the point of having smooth pathways was a Sisyphean task. Luckily, I soon discovered the terrain spline tool and proceeded to start on a workflow where splines really came in to save the level. After making pathways with splines, I sculpted the rest of the terrain around it to have a rough approximation of the level.

Another problem started to arrive when I started to populate the level with meshes that followed these paths. After some thinking, I recalled that in Blender, there is an option to duplicate instances of an object on an array along a curve, and proceeded to wonder if there was some equivalent version of this in Unreal Engine. While a tool for that did not exist to my knowledge, it was entirely possible to make that tool itself! Thanks to the following video I was able to make an actor that, using a spline component, populates static meshes along a spline.

 Populating Meshes Along a Spline | Tips & Tricks | Unreal Engine
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OdjvlvGRYRE

Below is the current version of the level. Up next, I plan to start working on the main building as it's going to take a large amount of time based on its complex Gothic architecture

This week, I was tasked with recreating a real-world environment via blockmesh in Unreal Engine. The environment had to be an interior based on actual reference photos. Not just an assortment of shapes, but a readable and navigable area. 

Concept and Planning

My first challenge was trying to decide what real-world representation I was going to recreate. I struggled with this choice because there are a lot of things to consider. I didn't want to choose an area that's too large for fear of overshooting the scope of a relatively simple assignment. The area had to be decently sized, not too big but also not too small. And it should be populated with items, not overloaded, but also not empty and sterile.

Ultimately, I decided to recreate my apartment living area. In total, this includes the foyer, living room, and kitchen. Recreating my apartment had its own set of benefits. For one, I would be intimately familiar with the scale of the objects in the room relative to each other. Also, I had a fairly dense living space that I felt would look interesting when blocked out.

Pictures I took as reference on a Pureref board

Development Process

The actual development process was relatively simple. Based on the reference images, I started to construct some of the walls in loose shapes, frequently running around in the third-person character controller to ensure the scale felt appropriate. Then I started from the back of the room, slowly adding items and checking their scale in reference to both the player model and the other objects in the room. The objects were recreated using geometry boxes and the brush modeling mode to edit them. Below is the work-in-progress version room

After finishing the above version, I sat down and asked for a review of my level. The main takeaways were that some blocks were not readable enough and just gave the impression of being basic cubes. Additionally, the height of some of the counters seemed a bit high, and the roof could go with being more detailed after all this. I also decided to change the lighting, materials, further detail some meshes, and add binds to the windows. Below is the finished version after a review.

Challenges and Solutions

I struggled a fair bit during this assignment. The reasons were a combination of things, but the main struggle came from the workflow of using Unreal's modeling tools. For some reason, the process felt unintuitive to me. Having to use transform gizmos to move dozens of blocks felt tedious, as did having to tab into another window and back each time I wanted to switch from extruding to edit mode. 

Some things I can do to improve on this are:

Get more familiar with UE's modeling tools and practice in order to work faster and more efficiently. Additionally, I could also try to figure out another workflow where the level blockout is imported from an actual modeling program, where I can iterate and develop much faster