Building Generator (Tool)
Technical Designer
Aug 2019 - Sept 2019 (~50 hours) | Solo | Unreal Engine 4
I started developing a tool that accelerates the process of building houses with modular assets, hoping that it could be used to create a large, urban city for Mu and The Little Reef. We chose to use coral / rock houses that will be built in a different way, so I've had to leave the tool unfinished for now.
- Designed a building method that's easy to understand and use, works for a wide variety of architectural styles, and minimizes need for unique art assets. The user builds the structure from cubes that are one of 5 types: wall, balcony, and roofs of 3 different steepness-es.
- Created placeholder assets in MagicaVoxel to test the tool and provide visual examples for finished art assets
- Made data tables and structs that allow users to easily create and edit their own, interchangeable part styles with new assets
- Created a generator Blueprint that can be placed, set to use a part type, and builds static meshes when the user calls a function in the details panel.
- The generator successfully built walls balconies, and flat roofs. The steeper roofs need future development.
- Moving forward, I would write documentation for creating assets that can be used with the tool, how to edit the data tables to use those assets, and how to use the generator Blueprint to create houses.
Blueprint sample: wall building function
For a generator set to create walls, this function would be called when the user tells it to build the house. It uses a variety of other functions I created to box trace for building parts around it, rotates its static mesh, and select a random mesh based on the type of wall it is (straight, bent, ground floor).