Progress Update #16

 Improving the Skybox


    I only had one deadline today so this progress update is going to be a little shorter. The feature that I had to complete was to improve the skybox. This meant adding support for nebulae. 

Nebulae:

    Looking at pictures of the night sky online, I noticed that there was more going on than just stars. The main thing was interstellar clouds of gas or distant clouds of stars. Without fully simulating these complex structures, I believed I could fake them with some random noise. Now, what I came up with is not too complex but I believe it produces a solid illusion of these structures and definitely gives the skybox more variety. In my opinion the desaturation really sells the effect (note: the first three example pictures were taken before I added desaturation, see the last picture for what desaturation looks like).


    I also wrote the corresponding C++ to make all of the material parameters editable in the scene.
    Additionally to nebulae, I tried my hand at making a galaxy arm from noise but that didn't turn out too well. The noise would have to tile to make the UV seam of the skybox mesh invisible while also being noisy enough to be 'realistic'. In the end I couldn't get it looking good but I think the nebulae are enough for now.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Polishing the Foundation

Image
     This sprint was relatively uneventful; mainly cleaning up the existing foundational elements of the game (the first person character and spell component) and continuing to improve the necessary elements of the game like the pause screen. Player Character & Spells      The improvements to the player character come in two parts; the ability to have, use, and change spells, as well as interaction via an interface. Both of theses are as simple as I could make them. Utilizing inheritance from USpellBase using the spells is only really a single line, and changing out the spells we can use the NewObject factory to make a new spell very simply. FirstPersonCharacter.h FirstPersonCharacter.cpp      As for the interaction interface, it only consists of two functions right now, one to fire an interaction event and one to check if the object can be interacted with. This second function is used mainly to show UI on the player's screen like...
Read more

Progress Update #13

Image
  Niagara Asteroids in UE4     These past few days I have continued work on asteroids. Only that now I have ditched instanced static meshes in favor of getting my hands on the new-ish Niagara particle system.  Learning Niagara     I have decided that since this is an entirely new subsystem of the engine I would do everything in blueprint first, then transition everything to C++ when I knew it was working reliably. Additionally, because Niagara is still relatively new, the official documentation is sparse if existent at all. So with most tutorials at this time geared towards blueprint implementation, starting in blueprint will give me the highest likelihood of finding a solution to any problems I may come across. The Niagara Workflow     The first thing I learned about Niagara is that the workflow has changed significantly from what cascade was. Where in cascade (to my limited knowledge) you worked in one particle system where e...
Read more

A New Chapter

Image
     This week has presented the biggest change probably since the release of Mini Solar System; I was offered a full-time position as a junior programmer at Studio 369 which I was happy to accept. I start on Monday and I couldn't be more excited to work with the team there! However, this did mean though that my priorities shifted quite instantaneously. I went from working full-time on "RPG_Game" to preparing for this new job. This mainly meant getting up to speed on networking as that is the one area of Unreal Engine I feel I have a lack of knowledge in (I'm already proficient in UI, AI, gameplay, materials, and general backend work), and since 369's specialty is networking I figured I would come prepared. I did do a little work on "RPG_Game" but it was minimal just to tie up some loose ends. Unreal's Multiplayer Framework      As explained by the Unreal Engine documentation, "multiplayer programming [is] inherently more complex than programmin...
Read more