Progress Update - 24-30th April 2023 - Building an Environment

I have decided to pivot from the shooting range task to exclusively creating an immersive environment, which I feel will familiarise me with more aspects of the engine. In creating a new environment, I have had the opportunity to come to understand how Unreal's new Nanite system works, and have decided to utilise it in my environment with the static cliff meshes I have opted to use, for better performance when playtesting. I also have used the Quixel Megascans library, as well as some assets taken from Unreal Sensei (https://www.youtube.com/@UnrealSensei), which helped me as building detailed environments from scratch is quite time consuming. For example, I had previously tried to create my own mountains, and found it difficult as I am unfamiliar with  the landscaping tool and I was unsure of how to properly recreate realistic terrain.

This process has also familiarised me with creating materials. Unreal Sensei has a tutorial series on the basics of material creation, particularly landscape materials, and although I am using a landscape material that he created, I still followed along and adapted what he did in the series in an attempt to create my own. This has helped me to understand how to create my own materials from scratch and how to stop problems like texture repetition. Whilst creating my environment, I ran into into an issue where the foliage that I'm using is almost invisible, which I am still trying to solve.

The top image is my original attempt at an environment. I wasn't happy with how it looked, especially with how unnatural the cliff looked, since cliffs in real life have a lot of depth and variation. I decided to use static meshes to detail the cliff face since it would have taken me a lot longer to do it myself, and the megascans assets are very realistic. I intend to create a cabin for the player to spawn in, which would also act as the menu area.