Honours Project Development: Room Development

Building room. Time: 3 days

I found good looking free asset pack for sci-fi interiors and I believed that in maybe one day I’ll be able to use it in my project. So, I began by importing project scene that came with asset pack. Migration process of materials, props and textures was easy and quick. As I’m using modular room Blueprint for all the rooms, I decided to use all assets in this BP one by one. And then I found that BP doesn’t like huge number of objects. Together with lighting I had more than 100 objects to move, rotate and resize in three-dimensional space where after every change I had to wait 20-60 seconds before UE4 could calculate this change. I guess it’s because it was applying change also to every BP used in the scene which is about 110 of them. Surprisingly I was patient enough to work like that for about 1,5 day while watching videos about quantum physics – it’s probably what saved me from falling into madness. Of course, I had problems with lighting even that I copied 1:1 from original scene from asset pack which is very bright. Mine is dark now but it was much worst before I tried multiple (sometimes very strange) things while trying to brighten room up. Unfortunately, while in original project it was not a problem in my scene, I had issues with lighting as it’s limited in amount lights that can be used in the same space at once. I’m still trying to figure out why some lighting works in Blueprint but not in scene. From everything that I read it should be much brighter but it’s not. It seems that I have to live with it.

After 1,5 day of work where I had just two walls done and a bit of ceiling I decided to do meshes once again but in scene editor mainly because I had a lot of objects in BP already and because of modular nature of the room I had to be sure that it will merge perfectly with other rooms in the scene. In editor I had no problems with calculation times and it was almost instant like <1 second after any change. I merged all the meshes used for every wall and ceiling into single meshes ‘wall 1’ ‘wall 2’ ‘ceiling’. Then at day three I found that I made mistake in ceiling mesh as it included additional meshes far away from the room. So, to fix that I merged ceiling once again and of course I ran into problems as after importing it to BP and setting location like the original ceiling mesh it was fine in BP but in scene editor position of ceiling was in different location. After cleaning project and some minor fixes, I had nothing else to do than reimport ceiling mesh again and this time it updated location in scene editor. Now I still have issues with lighting as it doesn’t render as it should and it’s super dark again…

Building floor brought new issues of course. I made first version then I decided to make it simple because it was too much to use so many different assets for the floor. So, I ended up with version 2 where used meshes were almost the same plus wooden parts were used to. And after implementation I found out that different footstep sounds don’t work. First thing I did as to check out my footstep’s settings in player blueprint. I made slight change but to be honest I had no idea why footsteps don’t want to change anymore. Maybe I made my own blueprint implementation too easy? I tested it with new default box with hard wood surface and it works. I tried with plane object and it works so I did new floor asset once again and… after implementation into blueprint it didn’t worked again even that it was fine before. After further investigation finally, I found culprit: newly made floor asset had no simple collision. So, I changed settings to use advanced collision as simple and now everything works. Yas! Now I have to record new footsteps for metal surface because these that I recorded in the past sounds awfully bad especially in comparison to hard floor sounds that is already in the project.