Hello? Well, we got encouraged to share our work so here is my version of CC, except it’s not really a cavern anymore.
I will probably keep expanding on it, there are some things I’d like to remake and fix first.
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I am blown away! This is amazing work! Keep it up!
May the force be with you!
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Thanks!
The Force is strong with this one. Awesome!
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There is only one thing I can say: UAU! Good work!!!
Hey wow! This is awesome! Sorry im still a newbie to all of this, this is one of my first ventures into UE4 im wondering did you use something like blender or equivalent, possibly even just a pre-made asset for the BB8 as well as the alternative effects?
Hi, I made the BB8 asset my self using Blender and Substance Painter. It didn’t take too long since it’s basically just a ball with a head. Though it would have been more difficult to make the texture without Substance Painter it wouldn’t be impossible (I would take a dffrent approach with the UV map in such a case).
I’m not sure what you mean by alternate effects, at least there aren’t any on the BB8 them self. If you mean the crystal glow than it’s just a Unreal Light component and Emission shader.
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Awesome thank you for that info! Yes i was referring to the crystals 
im still very new so the only effects ive done were the emmision on my crystals from the project.
The BB8 looks awesome, ive got the gamedev.tv blender3d course which im going to start soon im excited to be able to make cool meshes like BB8 
Is substance painter your application of choice or are there other options to achieve the same goal? As i havent looked into 3d modelling as yet im not sure of the functionality included within blender for example?
Blender is my main choice for modelling while Substance is my go to texturing tool.
As far as I’m aware there aren’t really any great alternatives to Substance and quiet frankly making textures the “old way” is a bit more of a pain in the arse.
There are many advantages to using Susbstance but the main two are:
- Multi Layer PBR painting
- Procedularly generated texture effcect.
The first one basically means that you can paint several textures at once. As materials are composed of multiple textures (most commonly Albedo, Roughness, Metalness, Normal/Height, Emission), being able to paint over many at the same time with one uniform brush stroke gives very clean results and speeds up the process by a lot. For example, if you wanted a part of the model to look metallic you can paint onto the Albedo, Metalness and Rougnsess maps at the same time allowing you to make a shiny metal colored decal.
You could also mix the Normal/Height maps in, allowing you to make an illusion of groove/bump being created or to simply override the Normal map of the underlying texture. In a scenario where you painted metal on wood (such as nail heads for example) you probably wouldn’t want the wood normal of the wood grain to show up anymore on the metal part.
TLDR This lets you very quickly and preciasly stamp and layer textures and materials to create a very nice results.
Blender does also support texture painting however even with addons that make it easier you can only paint one layer at a time. This mens that if you wanted to paint in a metal decal you would have to make the same brush stroke 3 times on 3 different layers which is quiet difficult, you’d lose presision and have to waste time making corrections. This is why most people who do texture painting in Blender mostly only focus on the Albedo texture. Additionally you can’t really paint in Normals easily in Blender, there are ways but it’s all not ideal workarounds and the performance between the two is like night and day. Texture painting in Blender can be choppy even when working with moderate sized textures and level of detail models while Substance is silky smooth practically no matter what you throw at it (at least I’ve never expirienced any hickups when using it).
The only other alterative is to do it the old way, which is to make a high res model right of the bat, texture the shit out of it in a manual way using image editing software, than bake it all onto a lower poly game asset. This is a lot more tedious as you don’t really get to see real time results of the changes you make while working on the textures, it also requires a lot more planning and work on your UV projections while Substance has more leeway for them to be sloppy, to the point where if you really want to just get something textured fast you could just use an autogenreted projection without marking a single seam.
Onto the second point, proceduraly generated textures. Substance can do a lot of heavy lifting for you with that system, it genrates taxtures based on specified masks and parameters which you can further adjust the values of. For example you can add dirt and grime into crevices where it would accumulate by a few drag and drops from the materials library. Such an effect can be genrated based on Ambient Occlusion mask or based on angles between geometry etc.
You can also mask based on specific polygons in the model, so masking in base materials for different parts of an object is incredibly easy.
In addition there are particle genrated effects that you can paint in, such as rain drop tracks, leakege, cracks, burns, bullet marks, you name it. I’m sure you can imagine how useful that is.
Usually that is something that you’d have to painstakingly paint in manually or source and overlay from a reference image, so being able to generate it on the fly saves a lot of time.
In Blender you can do the same thing using the materials node editor, but although it’s techically a more powerful system it is much harder to use and there are no presets so achiving the same result tends to take much longer.
Aditionally Substance also has a lot of export options for various game engines or project formats which, while a simple feature, is rather convinient.
To summarise, Blender has it all for your modelling needs but falls short on the texturing side (though it still does more than most 3D modelling software lol).
Substance Painter is the king of texturing. Honestly if you’re looking to create your own assets then you should definetly pick it up and the amount of time it will save you will be worth every penny.
You don’t have to use their subscription model, you can buy a permanant copy on steam for £95, which is a good amount of change but it still much better then paying for a monthly subscription. If that’s too much for you then you should keep an eye out for sales, it’s not uncommon for it to be at 50% off two or three times a year.
EDIT, sorry for all the typos, it’s really late for me and I didn’t proof read ahead of time
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Thanks so much for this detailed responce! Im definitely going to approach the blender substance combo as youve suggested. I think you can pay a pay out after 12 months of sub so i might take that approach. Do you know if you can resub for further updates at later stages?! Anywho i cant wait to spend many painful hours learning 3d modelling and texturing but youve saved me a lot of hunting time with this info thank you 
Sorry, but I’m not awere how exactly their subscription model works right now, it is something you’d have to research your self. I’m still using Substance 2018 that I’ve purchased a couple years ago. I may consider buying a new version at some point but only if I see them add some feature that I feel that I really need. Most Substance updates though are just for very advanced features or performence improvements, which while nice are not really that compelling for me to upgrade yet.
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Wow! Very creative. Sooo impressed! Well done!
Thank you!
Nice work! I’m curently trying to get Crystal Cavern into a form that can be a shipped game. I’ve made 5 levels by now, but after seeing your version, I need to work on it some more. It looks good, the controll could use some improvement as I died many times trying to brake, but it’s amazing!
I’m glad you enjoyed it. I think the controls are a somewhat difficult but the way I see it that’s kind of the point of the game to some extent, otherwise there would really be no difficulty to it (at least not with the existing obstacles).
Braking is certainly quite difficult to do since the game is powered mostly by the Unreal built-in physics engine, and it takes an euqal amount of force to counteract the existing forces on the ball. In other words if you accelerate for a certain distance you can expect to have to break for about the same distance.
Well, it’s not like there are no ways around that but at that stage I was yet to try implementing any of them. Also the physics within Unreal can act very weirdly when dealing with big changes in forces or large forces in general.
In an ideal scenario you’d build some pseudo-physics model to drive a game like this that would be better suited for this particular type of puzzle and give you the freedom to tailor it until it feels just right. It’s not really a feasible task for a beginner however.
This is outstanding! You clearly have a lot of talent 
This is just awesome!