Adding Consumable Loot

Today in Unreal Engine we looked at creating useful loot which drops after a target is killed.

To do this we created a new blueprint actor which we called loot and assigned any static mesh as a placeholder, we then added a collision box which allows it to interact with the player. From here we accessed its blueprints to tell it to add 30 to the players max ammo when it is walked over and then to destroy itself.

To make it drop from the target we opened the targets blueprints and created the string of code that when its destroyed it will drop the loot in the air in a random direction.

Texturing In Maya Using Gradients

Creating my gradient –

First of all I had to create my gradient which I will use for the colors of my tree. I started by created a canvas 256 x 256 pixels wide and long and using the gradient tool to create a brown and green gradient. The bottom pegs of the gradient menu are to change the color and the top are for opacity. Once done I placed my gradient on my canvas and saved it as a JPEG.

Using my gradient to texture the tree –

To do this I opened the tree file and then selected the object and pressed the “Display Hypershade Window” button which opened the materials of the object, I selected Lambert 1 and then opened the wire map, I added a file to it which was my gradient and then had to connect the file wire to the objects wire map, to do this i dragged the out pin to the color pin of my object.

This gave it the colors but they were not correctly aligned.

To align them I opened my uv map, selected the trunk of the tree and selected planar on the UV tab, this then allowed me to drag the UV map of the trunk into the brown part of the gradient which then made the trunk brown,

I repeated this for each bunch on top of the tree to make them green with the top part being lighter than the others to create the effect of a light source impacting the object.

This is what it looked like when I had finished.

Trends

Today in Game Theory we looked at popular trends in the gaming industry in the last 5 years so that we can compare to our own ideas to see what people will enjoy and make sure the ideas are not out of date.

I created a mind map to help to visualize this process.