So, for my take on this, I wanted to go for a low-key, spooky environment. I wanted to have lots of fog, diffused lights, and a suburban home that felt particularly ordinary. The idea is that we can make all of the future children/parents appear to be in a functioning society. This could make a scenario all the more creepy since even if our piñata escapes, he will likely never know peace. Below are some pictures, then a couple of drawings that helped me flesh my ideas out.
Unreal is really amazing! However, it had quite the learning curve. I ended up restarting multiple times during the landscape process, but am ultimately ~ satisfied ~ with my final output. In the future, I will take more screenshots of my journey, but for now I only have the hero images below.
This was BY FAR the hardest part of the process. The landscapes they give you are incredibly difficult to understand the scale for. The first time I made one, it was at the max Y coordinate, and absolutely massive. After I painted it using a landscapeMaterial I made with the visual coder, I realized that the road I had made was the equivalent to a 10lane highway.
Eventually, I was able to reduce the landscape to a really small size (the only one my brain could comprehend). I also NEEDED to import the third person character into the scene for scale. I did not use anything from that pack in my final output, though. A huge part of my success had to do with using splines to map out the curves of my landscape.
I also struggled a lot with the water. There doesn't appear to be a simple way to edit the landmasses it creates. The ocean doesn't connect to a mainland continent, you can't easily edit the shoreline, and you have to start with the ocean water or else it totally breaks your landscape.
To be honest with you, I have no idea how I got my water working. Eventually... it just worked.
This took a lot of getting used to. I started with the environmental light mixer and followed the tutorial from the supplemental video. I ran into some issues here. For one, I somehow ruined the control-L light source moving tool. I completely blew out the horizon and couldn't fix it. I restarted lighting quite a few times.
Once I got the env. light mixer working, I couldn't figure out at all how to turn it into night, so I went back to the BP_Skysphere and did it there. I also changed the sky to an eerie, unrealistic, black color.
After this, I wanted to add some volumetric fog. I didn't do anything particularly interesting in the settings, but did bump the density beyond the default maximum. I love the effect I eventually got. Especially with the blueprints, which I will talk about below. I also used a couple of spotlights that I set as children to other objects to create light sources.
One thing to note: I did not realize that a geometry brush and a static mesh were different. This is why the house doesn't reflect the light at all. I understand I can convert it to a static mesh and it will fix itself, but I am unable to do so before class.
Since we were limited to just the palate of the starter content, I knew that I was going to need to get creative combining pieces. For this project, I made 4 different blueprints: lamp, lantern, fence, and table.
The process I used for all of these is quite similar, so I'm going to talk specifically about lamp and fence.