Once I’d completed the models, as mentioned in the last post, i moved on to placing the models in the game engine and starting to code it. Unfortunately for me, when i was doing this i had about a day to complete it, my planning throughout this project was rather bad, but I’ll review that in the evaluation. The game engine took ten attempts to load all one model in before it contained no holes or glitches, since I’d never done this before, when i exported the model from 3DS Max, into a “.OBJ” file (the type of file, or one of the types the Unreal 4 Engine would accept) it would come up with several errors stating there were “rat’s nests” in the mesh of the objects, i didn’t know what this was (there were 14 on the first attempt) so i pressed through it on the first attempt and found half of the model missing when i loaded it in, i foolishly forgot to take screenshots of this, but sufficed to say, this occurred 10 different times until I’d fixed it completely, whittling down the problems bit by bit by using the engine to identify the colliding polygons, removing them, and then reattaching them in a way that didn’t cause collisions (i should explain that a rat’s nest in 3DS Max is when two different polygons intersect and cause collisions, often the result of Boolean operators or a bad cap tool (cap tool being a tool that caps a hole in the object when you’ve selected the border to cap).
Once in the game engine, I started working on shading the project, because even though it wasn’t textured, i could easily apply shading, or so i thought, the engine struggled to build the lighting on the project since there were still some errors i hadn’t fixed, so to quickly fix the problem I added a different type of light that didn’t need to build the lighting in, and left it at that, only changing it by adding some of the planes into the skyline to paint the picture of what i wanted to show.
GregSkiiArt 