BUILD AN ANIMATED IN-GAME ASSET FOR UNREAL ENGINE 4
The canopy billows and flutters as it holds on tightly against the harsh arctic winds, the fire snapping back strong as it lifts embers to the air. An interior lamp illuminates the surroundings in a deep, flickering orange glow, as light passes through the translucent barriers to the outside world.
This tutorial will run you through the development process of creating a game-ready, mildly technical asset for Unreal Engine 4; a snowy campsite tent. It covers some key areas of interest for creating real-time assets in today’s industry, such as setting up materials to make textures look higher res than they actually are, and creating animation that never loops. We discuss how modelling to scale from the very start will set you up for success throughout the project, and how to tackle building soft-body shapes from primitives.
We will create a procedural cloth displacement to simulate wind interacting with the tent canopy, set up subsurface scattering to help with believable lighting, build layered textures in Substance Painter, and go through some basic sculpting techniques in ZBrush for creating cloth. While many of the areas covered in this tutorial use these specific software packages, it should be noted that this same workflow can be applied regardless of tools or engine.
01 IMPORTANCE OF SCALE
Begin with large, simple shapes. Where possible it is best to start building to real-world scale as soon as you can, to avoid trying to scale things up or down later. This block started out as a cube roughly built to the width and height of a standard single-person tent. The result was then cut to represent the major structures of the tent.
02 ROUGH OUT THE FORM
Using a combination of extrusions and
