Abegayle Elmes

I have added some processes to my showreel. This was the advice from different unreal artists so I think this has improved my final major project.

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Here is the final showreel of my FMP. I have done a screen recording of playing the game from the start to the end. I wanted to export the game but I had issues with packaging the game on my laptop. Also I had to pay to officially make the game an app becauseI have an Apple laptop and also the game isn’t finished with levels etc. This is sort of an expo on a game demo. There is a bit of a lag on the recording because Unreal engine is a large programme and the quality doesn’t show as well on a screen recording unfortunately.

Pey Chi’s Response:

I made this game to learn Unreal but also to celebrate small business. I used gamification as a concept to bring Pey Chi’s Ceramics into the digital world for customers to interact with her product. She has given me free control to create whatever I like so when I finially finished I sent the video to her and she LOVED it! She also reposted it to her account to then name drop me to her vast followers to check out my work

I am super honoured that she loved it and it was the gratification I received from her that gave me a sense of achievement and confidence that I can find a job and thrive as an Unreal & Houdini Artist.

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I have applied for quite a few jobs now that I have finished my showreel and I have also reached out to Luke to advise on how to better my showreel. I have also messaged numerous Unreal Engine Artists in the industry who have responded with a lot of really good feed back for me to change.

Advice included:

• Include process
• Show that I know how to use various Blueprint techniques e.g. behavioural tree.
• Show examples of VFX I can do
• Add projects to my LinkedIn

Examples I will overlap onto my showreel….

Personal Reflection:

Now that I have finished, I can look back on this project as a success. I am proud of myself that I was able to complete this project with no help from anyone and I researched and applied the parts of online resources that made sense to what I needed to learn. I feel like this will be a good point to mention in job interviews as I have got some interest to be an NFT artist. Being an NFT artist isn’t necessarily what I am looking to do but it could be the stepping stone to getting another further down the line.

Now that I am finished my Master, I am excited and nervous for the future. I have taken full advantage of what this course has offered and I feel very grateful for the time I have had working. I think that my prospects are definitely better than they once were. I am excited to get into the industry and continue to learn more. I hope that I will be well mentored by senior members of staff wherever I work. I do hope that being a part of the unreal engine industry isn’t a complete boys club – as I have noticed a lot of the Unreal jobs are based around fighting and killing. However, I am hopeful I will get there eventually.

I had to find a new way of making the clouds move so I used these tutorials to follow and utilise the existing systems to create clouds.

I was successful in building the clouds for the scene. They moved constantly when the game was in play mode. It was sad to have to get rid of the other clouds I made but now I at least know how to do them both.

I also felt there was a little bit too much empty space so using the landscaping techniques I had learnt previously, I sculpted the landscape in those particular areas. I then removed the tiles not being used which were covering the sea. I like that there are some more organic shapes in the level and not just blocks etc.

I needed to create a widget for the ending page like I have done for the game over widget. I needed to create and ending area so that once the mug overlapped it would tell the blueprint to pop up the final page and to add the scores up.

Here was the final widget that adds up all of the coins, flowers and health to give a total score. I am pleased with how this game out as it kept to the style of the other widgets and also I was able to figure out how to create a mathematical system to automatically add up the game each time I got a different score.

I wanted to make sure that when the project was finished that it was lit in the correct way so the project is considered at a professional standard. I followed this tutorial to try and learn about what world settings and light settings are good. It was interesting to learn that there is a real science behind replicating world settings.

Bellow you can see the procedural clouds I had made but I couldn’t figure out how to animated them constantly as clouds do.

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This is my scene so far but I need to add in a slight fog to the horizon so that the black doesn’t show.

I am now learning about how to use widgets in Unreal Engine. This means I can overlay information like how many coins I have collected to inform the player of how well they are doing. I was to make a health bar which will decrease when in contact with the dog AI characters. I want a count for how many coins collected and flowers watered. In order to really understand the maths and blueprints I needed to use a few tutorials online to learn. These three were the most valuable to me.

So now that I am making widgets I have taken images from online, and tailored them in illustrator to design a widget for the game I used the style that Pey Chi used to create icons to represent the coins, life (heart) and flowers as seen below.

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Here is the page I made for the game over. I took the image of where Pey Chi wrote her short biography and in illustrator used the letters to re write the messages on screen. I thought this worked really well with the aesthetic of hand drawn and made through out her website and instagram.

Below is the widget I made to be overlayed the game so the user can keep track of how well they are doing.

I also wanted some informative information to pop up on the screen when in a situation the user needs to know what to do. For example, stay clear from the dog as it will decrease their health value or what key to press to shoot the water balls at the flower.

Lastly I have create a widget to appear on screen once the user has completed the level I used illustration of Pey Chi to decorate the screen with space for the total score of the player. This is something I will need to figure out how to use and set up.

I am happy with the over all designs of the widgets as it is all based around designs of Pey Chi which is the most important part of the project.