Creating a Series Pt 10 - Going backwards

Making Of / 11 March 2019

Hello There!

The last couple of weeks I've been going back and forth from doing temple-assets (which I'm not all that happy with) to working on the Grassland village assets that I currently have, but before moving further I wanted to start setting up my project for the future. 

So I had to take several steps backwards and implement World Composition in UE4 for my project.

World Composition basically let's you have one master level and then load in other levels into the master level to work on them. The Sub-levels are regular levels and can have terrain in them. Before I was working on one huge 8k map, using 1 landscape. Now I'm working on four 4k levels that represents different regions of the game, all of which have their own Landscapes and props in their levels.

I've actually gone backwards in terms of quality since I lost some work trying to set this stuff up. I've lost:

  • All vegetation painting
  • All terrain material painting

All in all it hasn't been so bad, at least now it will at least allow me to actually work on different areas / levels without having to load everything at once and if I decide to sometime in the future collaborate with someone it'll make it easier to divide the project into different sections you could potentially develop. That said, it also gives me a bunch of other things that are good, like if one level somehow ends up becoming corrupted I don't lose all of it and hopefully, it'll be easier to restore, but who knows? That stuff is currently beyond my knowledge working with production workflows in UE4 sadly.

After spending some more time thinking about things I decided to skip the temple-stuff for now and re-double my focus on the grassland huts. So I started making some more small props for the huts.

This time around I was trying to make use of the textures I already had to make some tree-stumps. The villagers being mostly foresters end up using a lot of wood for most of their craft thus I felt like it was appropiate to also make these stumps, an axe and some logs to boot.

After that I spent some time during the weekend making Fog Particles, these are currently huge sprites but I'm considering another approach that would potentially allow me to do something nicer looking but also cheaper. One issue that I'm currently getting in UE4 is depth-sorting issues when these translucent particles are ontop of the water that I've currently have got going. 

The solution to the problem was to set the Translucent Sort Priority in each particles detail tab to a value higher of 0 (since default value is 0). This made it so that the fog/clouds will always render ontop of  everything else generally. It's something to keep in mind for the future!


I've also spent some time making fire particles based on the Rime-stuff that Simon Schreibt posted. Very handy and seems generally super cheap.

Other News

In other news my latest source of inspiration comes from the Animé; Made in Abyss.
Beautiful background work and some lovely mysterious placing to explore which speaks directly to what I'm actually currently doing in my own project. I can't help but to look at some of this and go: this is exactly the type of stuff I want to do.

I guess that's it for now, I've been considering moving onto another area for a bit but I'm pondering if it's a good idea or not.
Oh well, until next time!

Warping out!

/Chris Radsby