Hi, my name is Max Dörper and I’m responsible with making the game look pretty. I’m also the groups Scrum Master which I will go into in more detail later in this devlog. If you have not read our first devlog I’d suggest you do because it is a good introduction to the project.
This devlog is gonna focus on three main points.
Importing Unity assets to Unreal Engine 4.
Post-Processing creation and progress.
Scrum planning and work schedule.
Importing Unity assets to Unreal Engine 4
To start off I’d just like to say that this is a school project but we don’t have any 2D/3D artists so we are very reliant on asset packs. Sense I already owned a few horror themed asset packs I thought it would be a simple task to import my Unity assets to Unreal Engine 4, wrong. Turns out most assets aren’t even compatible with both game engines.
First prefabs just disappeared sense Unreal uses a blueprint system instead. This wasn’t too unexpected but that wasn’t all. All materials was also missing and all meshes had very odd origin points.
All these assets have the same origin point. :(
So here is a guide to fix these assets into a usable state.
For props such as a bed or bookshelf you first create an ‘Empty Actor’. Then press the ‘Blueprint/Add’ Script button and save it with the same name as the mesh. In the blueprint editor open the viewport panel and add a static mesh component. Set the static mesh to the mesh you wish to use. Apply materials and increase the size. (Unity assets are typically 10 times smaller than Unreal assets)
Here comes the fiddly bits. In the viewport try to get the prop as close to the origin point of the empty actor. I used Top perspective to make it easier. Also a tip you can use alt+middle-Mouse to temporarily change a origin point.
You most likely also have to fix the collision. Then you have to open the mesh in Unreal’s Mesh editor. Start by removing the current collision, then you could manually add collision boxes to everything. However if you are lazy like me just use the ‘Convex Decomposition’ tool to auto generate a collision.
Save everything and boom you have hopefully converted a Unity asset into Unreal Engine 4. Now you just have to do it all over again for every asset. Note: This is only how I fixed it and if you know of a better way of converting assets you can email me: [email protected] thanks :D
Post-Processing creation and progress
I didn’t really know much about Post-Processing before this project. But it only took about a day to learn the basics. Because I had to import assets into the project I didn’t have that much time to work on post-processing.
First I worked on creating a screen flash. This effect could be used when the player respawns or is blinded in a scripted scene.
After that I started playing around a lot more with the settings. Adding Depth of Field, grain and other image effects.
And lastly when I felt more comfortable with post-processing in Unreal is started working on more general post-processing such as color grading, tonemapping, contrast and gamma. I tried to make the “Fear” effect invoke a more spooky feeling to the player. By significantly reducing saturation and increasing the contrast. I also added a screen filter to make the game appear more dark and scary.
Scrum planning and work schedule
To finish of this devlog I’d like to talk a bit about my role as Scrum Master. I started by making all group members write tasks on HacknPlan so that we had the most important tasks ready. This took a little more than a day of work from the group, but this will ultimately make our workflow so much more effective.
I also had a short introduction on how to use both HacknPlan and SourceTree to make the process more effective. The group can work very well on its own, as it should be.
I hold a daily scrum meeting with the group where we discuss what everyone did the day before and what they plan to work on the current day. After that I check if there is anything of importance to bring up from our HacknPlan. In addition to the daily scrum meetings we also have weekly sprints to check what features was completed that week.
I am really impressed with the work we have done so far and I believe that we can deliver a good product.
//Max Dörper
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