Terrain Time

This was a tough day in level design. What I worked on here is actually a first draft for a level of a capstone project. I won't spoil all the details, but it's a sports game with large asymmetrical real world levels. You'll be able to see the 2 goal zones around the castles and 3 kill zones on the 3 flat areas down below.

This map is inspired northern Germany, particularly the Bavarian alps and the castles situated therein. The 3 large flat spaces at the bottom of the level are frozen lakes, the rest of the area is mountainous rocky paths. The game deals a lot with movement and collision physics so the map is set up to allow people to knock things off ledges toward the kill zones, and to provide multiple choke points and potential paths to the goal zones at the far ends of the map. As a side note, all of the ramps and pathing was hand done, I didn't use the ramp tool at all as it looked too unnatural.

Sadly, a lot of my programming intentions fell through. The kill zones aren't working for the Ice pillars (which represent enemies), though I can switch the blueprint to have them kill the player.
The goal zones tick up your score but I have not gotten it to stay on the HUD for more than a few seconds. Most importantly, when you hit the IceFoes, they go flying and I cannot figure out how to reduce the impact. I've tried a few things like turning there weight up to 3 tonnes, but that didn't effect anything.

I'd like to come back and improve this when my knowledge of Unreal is equally improved.

An overview after the initial sculpting. From this distance a lot of the mountain ridges smooth out, but I believe that by this point I had already done most of them.

This is the forming of the cinner lakes and the choke points. From here you can see four ramps that lead down into the different lakes providing multiple options for attack.

I built a castle out of basic geometry. In game, this will be a spawn point and a goal zone.

There is no jumping in the game, so needless to say, I had to delete it.

This is my little score Blueprint. It's simple, but it works nicely. the other part is in the Level blueprint which uses an EventOnOverlap trigger.

A shooting gallery. That green sphere is a kill zone trigger.

I made the sky darker, and added a bit of blue to the skylight to make everything feel colder.

Looking into the basin.

Mah VID:

MineCraft Map

Dear professor Zuccarello, I know you said to start logging our time on the hw. I regret that I did not accurately log mine. However, I know that it has taken approximately 15 - 20 hours to make everything here including the UVs the textures, and the map itself. I have no sense of whether or not that is an appropriate amount of time. In any case, the following is a video capture of me traversing the level.

(Video Coming Soon)

And now for some build pictures, YAYYYYYYY! There are quite a few.

I snipped out the UV's of a beveled cube.

Then I used grid snapping to fill in all of the little hole and gaps.

This is the very start. I decided to build the cave from the inside out. Still haven't decided it if this was a good idea.

Getting a sense of scale, the cave is almost big enough.

Here we are on top, planning out the bottom of the upper pond.

Went back and made some mossy stones and then overdid it. Had to trim the hedges significantly.

Ahh, that's better. 

A river flows through here. Sadly, this river was neither opaque nor non-collidable. To solve opacity I had to make another base material. To fix collisions, I got to learn about the various selection tools. This was really REALLY useful info.

Built out my little lake and started thowing around massive chunks of grass (homemade).

A view of the whole map from the sky. Only one thing left to do.

Diamonds can be everyone's best friend when we oppose traditional gender roles!

You can also see an attempt at lighting.

I ended up needing another point light to make things look the way I wanted.

The point light did wonders to get that caverny feel, however I had to turn off emissives for this shot, and hence, the diamonds aren't shimmering the way the do in the final level.

MyFirstCube

My first time in unreal. Decided that if I was going to be a level designer, I better make the first level I ever played. Mind you, mine is a bit more 3 dimensional than the original. Most of the screen shots are me taking pictures after each set of pieces. Everything is, of course, made of nothing but my original 10x10x10 cube flattened, stretched, or colored.

Maya time

Alt-drag is bae.

Made the bushes monochromatic at first. Someone suggested darker highlights. I concur, good sir.

Accidentally perfect clouds.

Finished product.

Hello World

Hello World

Cause its tradition.