#10 - Placeholders In-Engine

This week, I took all the meshes I put together previously and brought them into UE5.

The result was this:

In some regards it looks better than the paint-over, for having more stuff in it, but obviously worse in other regards, for having finally ditched the free foliage, landscape material, and tree assets I'd been using to test it previously.

Overall though, I'm really pleased with the direction it's going. I think all the meshes I have in right now, even in their unfinished state, fit well together. I can also see much more clearly where the composition is strongest, and also where it falls down.

The tree (besides looking generally terrible) really highlighted the need for me to make at least two different versions for the final scene, as right now it's very obviously repeated.

The landscape is back to being one large green mass until I come to make a material that automatically textures the slopes. Likewise, the path is hastily painted in, roughly following the contours of the ground.

I'm think that in the final version, good foliage will make a huge difference, obscuring much of the otherwise plain ground, adding in vibrant pops of colour, and some gentle swaying motion, making the scene seem much more dynamic.

The tower in the back, I'm still unclear what my plan is with that. It's far too huge compared to the rest of the world, and just looks a bit out of place. It's possible I could do away with it entirely if I can frame the mountain better, and make it more interesting in it's own right.

When I first exported my meshes into the engine, I ran into an issue with the pivot points being incorrect. Instead of being at the object's pivot, they were at Blender's 0,0,0 scene origin point.

The manual fix for this seemed to be to stack all the meshes perfectly at 0,0,0 in the scene, then export them one-by-one. This was painful, and I very quickly got sick of doing it.

This is where I found "ACT" or "Asset Creation Toolset", a glorious Blender addon that, among it's features, includes a quick FBX Export toolset.

I used to use a similar addon for 3DS Max, so I was very happy to see someone had provided a similar addon for Blender.