Welcome back.
Now we still have some gameplay mechanics to flesh out in our RPG game.
But before we do that, I'd like to do a little something about our level for a couple of reasons.
For one, this default starting level and the way it looks is really kind of awful on the eyes.
It doesn't look great.
It doesn't make our particle systems look great.
The lighting isn't that good by default.
The starting maps that we get are not really game worthy.
So I'd like something that looks a little bit nicer, makes our assets look nicer.
And in addition to that, everything we've been testing works on a flat plane.
But what about geometry?
What about things getting in the way?
You know, we have this ability to run around.
We can go behind things.
What about large geometry that can obstruct our view?
So in this section, we're going to take care of those types of situations and we're going to make our
level look a little bit more like an actual game, not only to be more visually appealing, but also
so that we can have something that more resembles a game level and testing will be more accurate in
that sense.
So in this video, we're going to make a new level and change completely how it looks.
It's not going to be a daytime level.
This is a sort of dungeon crawler type RPG.
So we're going to want something a little more appropriate for that.
So let's get started.
So the first thing I'm going to do is make a new map.
I'm going to go to file new level, and I am going to start with basic, but we're going to be changing
quite a lot of things.
But basic is nice because it starts with a sky sphere, a directional light sky atmosphere, all that
good stuff.
So I'm going to create that and right away I'm going to save current level as I'm going to choose my
maps folder and I'll just call this one dungeon.
Now we may have multiple dungeons.
This could be Dungeon one, but for now I'm going to call it Dungeon.
We'll rename it later if we need to.
So what's going to change about our dungeon?
Well, first, the checkered floor has to go.
And I'm not a big fan of the grid.
It does serve a purpose.
It can be useful, but it can also sort of get in the way visually.
So this is personal preference, but I'm going to click show and uncheck grid so we can't see it.
I'm also going to take these key actors, the directional light sky atmosphere, skylight, volumetric
cloud and get these kind of out of the way.
Their location doesn't really matter, so I'm just dragging them up and away.
Now, if we bring anything into the world, I can just set its location.
I can go into my dungeon folder where I have some assets and I can take one of my three by three tiles,
sim tile three by three a for example, and I can just set its Z to zero.
That will put it down at the zero location of the world and I can even zero it out.
So it's completely in the origin.
So that gives me something to work with.
And if I have snapping on with a high grid snap value, I can duplicate this pretty easily and things
will just snap together.
So what I could do for tiles is every time I duplicate a tile, just kind of rotate it a little bit
so it's not exactly at the same orientation.
And that way we have something that looks somewhat different.
And I also have a second variation of the tile here.
And this one has one of those bricks kind of undone a little bit.
It's my favorite one.
I'm going to set this first at the origin.
And then I'll just move it over.
And it looks like I had duplicated that on accident.
So now I have something that resembles tiles.
It's a starting point, right?
And I don't have the tab open right now.
But if I go into window and show world settings, there's my World Settings tab and I can set my game
mode to beep or a game mode.
And that way if I have a player start, then aura will spawn in and that way we can make sure that our
geometry isn't going to let us fall through the floor or anything like that.
So I'm going to go to the Place Actors Panel and drag in a player, start right there and close that
panel and just press play and make sure that everything works as expected.
So all the tiles have collision.
There's even collision on that one little loose tile there.
So you can see it kind of steps up a little.
So this is looking better.
I'm not going to say it's looking good because the whole point of this video is to make this look good
as opposed to the default sky.
Everything's too bright.
So we're going to go through this one by one.
Now, it's generally a good idea to keep our geometry and our different level actors sorted out.
So if you like, you can take those floor tiles there right click and you can move to a new folder.
So clicking on create new folder.
We have a folder that can contain those meshes.
I'm just going to click on the folder, click on it again and call this dungeon meshes.
You could just call it meshes, but dungeon meshes will do.
And then we have lighting and all this other stuff except for the player start.
Everything else is in lighting and for me, that's fine.
I'm okay with that.
So I'd like to go through these actors and lighting one by one until we have something that's looking
a little bit more appropriate for what I want.
So the first one I'm going to click on is directional light, and I'm going to change it a little bit.
Let's go to the details panel.
And first of all, it's a bit too bright.
I think its intensity.
It's it's six right now.
I think it could go down to one and we'll have a lot less light and the light color, we can adjust
this a little bit.
I think I'm going to choose a red value of about 0.194618 and a green value of approximately 0.212231.
And a blue value of about 0.296138.
So we have this nice sort of grayish, almost blue color, and that's the light color that I'd like
for my directional light.
Now we can scroll down, though.
There are other settings.
We have temperature and we're using temperature and a higher and lower temperature is going to change
the temperature of the light.
If you know anything about color theory, the way I think of it is higher temperature is a bit bluer,
lower temperature is a bit more red, kind of like fire.
Hotter fire is generally bluer, going up to white at the highest temperatures and so on.
So it's at 6500.
I'm going to lower it slightly.
I'm going to bring it just a little bit more into the red zone, but not much, 6400 as opposed to 6500.
I'm pretty happy with that.
All right.
So I'm going to leave my directional light alone and move on.
I don't think I need to touch the exponential height fog.
If anything, I might change it later.
If we want more fog, more visible fog in our world.
For now, I'm going to leave it until all the other settings are set and then come back to it or not,
depending on how I like the level.
But I will go straight to my skylight.
I'm skipping the sky atmosphere as well for now and for the sky light.
I'd like to change the light color to something a little more bluish.
Not really too too crazy with this.
And we'll see this a little bit more once we change other parameters and the skylight becomes more reactive.
But we'll come back to the skylight as we add a post-process volume and change it and make things look
better.
We'll come back and probably take that intensity scale and change it as well.
Okay, so things are a little better.
Not a whole lot, but we don't have a post-process volume in here and that's really what's going to
make this thing pop.
So I'm going to go into volumes, find myself a post-process volume and drag it in.
And this can go up there with those other actors up and out of the way as its location.
Doesn't matter if we set it to infinite extent, which is what we're going to do.
So in the details panel, I'm going to search for infinite and check infinite Extent Unbound.
And that way it affects the whole level.
Now, once we start tweaking the Post-process volume, things are really going to start changing.
But before we do that, remember that our Post-process volume needs to use a certain post-process material
if we want our highlight effect.
So I'm going to search for material.
Expand post-process materials.
Add one element to its array.
Choose asset reference and I'm going to search for underscore, highlight, and get that highlight material
in there.
So that way our highlight material is going to work and after that we can just go through the Post-process
volume and start changing properties here.
And a lot of this stuff you can follow along with me if you like, but if I choose values that you would
rather choose different values for, feel free because it's really going to change how things look and
how things look is a matter of choice and style.
Right.
So in the Post-process volume, the first thing I like to change is if we search for EV, we have exposure
here.
I like to check both of these checkboxes and set them both to zero because I really am not a fan of
that exposure.
Now this is that annoying feature that when you go into the shadows, your eyes sort of slowly adjust.
And when you come out of the shadows, it takes a while for your eyes to adjust.
That's a real headache for me.
I really don't like it.
I want a constant level of lighting and I don't want it to mimic eyes adjusting.
Now, as soon as I set them both to zero, notice where quite a bit darker, right?
And for that reason, I'll go right back over to our skylight and we're going to up that intensity scale
by just a bit, probably something like 50.
Now we're still dark, but notice that we can see the ground a bit better.
That skylight is going to adjust the amount that we can actually see objects in here.
Now we'll add more objects as well.
But notice that with an intensity scale of a higher value, like 100, notice that the ground is a lot
brighter, lower it to 25 and it's a bit darker.
I find with these settings, 50 is just about pretty nice.
And if we want to really adjust our values, we should probably have more than just this monochrome
blue.
We should have objects in here with other colors so we can kind of compare.
So for that reason, I'm going to add a couple more of the assets from the dungeon.
One of them is corner.
So this corner is a piece that has the dungeon tiles, but it also has something that's a little bit
more of a popping color.
I'm going to go ahead and stick that in the corner there, and that gives us a little bit of some color.
I'm going to go ahead and duplicate it and move it over.
So we have one in the other corner as well, and then we can get an edge.
We have an edge piece as well that we can use.
It's called SM Edge and I believe we have a long one.
Edge to buy one.
Then there's also SM edge to buy two, and that one is a little bit wider in that dimension.
So I think I'm going to take at least one of these and move it.
I'm going to actually take its Z location and zero that so that it's down on the ground and easier to
manage.
And I'll go ahead and rotate it by 180 degrees and move it into place here and just see what we need.
We might actually end up using a wider piece zeroing out that Z.
I think I'd like to use the wider piece, so I'm going to delete this one.
And use the wider piece here.
And it's looking like this one when zeroed out.
It actually needs to be lifted up just a bit.
So we'll go ahead and change the snapping amount here to ten and lift it up.
Just until it looks good.
I might have to change it to five, actually.
And snap one more down there and that's going to do it.
Now, snapping increments back to 100.
I'm going to go ahead and basically center this and then move my corners out, trying not to have any
geometry overlapping as we can get z-fighting that way.
And with that, I'm just going to put some edge rails and we'll just have a little bit of some geometry
and we'll add more as we go.
But I just want a little bit of color that will pop for us, so.
Let's get some things in place here.
And notice that we have some space here.
I'm going to move this over and I have some filler geometry that we can use.
I think a one by two or perhaps a three by two might work.
A three by two is going to do it, I think.
So rotating that by 90 and moving it in place.
We have something we can use here.
Okay.
And I like this one with the loose tile, so I'm going to duplicate that and replace one of the other
pristine ones with this.
Probably this one here.
Just so we have some loose tiles in there as well.
Okay.
Now, I'm going to go ahead and just take this whole side here, duplicate that, rotate it by 180 and
bring it back.
And that way we'll have something we can work with here.
But I think this should be a little bit longer.
So I'm going to get that tile set edge.
The shorter one, I think it was this one.
No, it was the other one.
Tileset Edge two by two.
And I'm going to just connect these here.
See, if I can't manage to get something that's closed off properly.
And this one is already at the correct height.
Sometimes with these asset packs, you kind of have to adjust them as you see fit.
So I'm going to fill this in and time lapse the rest of it, and then we'll continue.
Okay.
So notice that as I was going, I rotated some things and as I duplicated, you know, you can make
it look like you're not reusing so many things.
Right?
Right Here I have one of those imperfect tiles with this sort of displaced tile here, and then I have
one here.
And, you know, next to each other, you can't really tell where one ends and one begins.
So that's pretty nice.
I'm going to go ahead and save all at this point.
And now we have something that we can use to kind of contrast.
It's not all blue.
We have some different colors and things.
And it can also help if we have some kind of particle systems in effect as well.
And, you know, the more different colors we have, the better.
Here's a beacon.
I can put a beacon here at the corner.
I could even probably scale it up if we wanted a larger beacon there.
And we can take one of these pillars, static mesh pillar and place one of these at one of these locations
here, maybe even put some fire on top of it.
If we go to assets effects fire, we have the Niagara system fire.
We can even put some fire there and just kind of see what that looks like with our lighting as well.
So we'll put a couple of those little fire pillars.
And that way we have something that's almost kind of resembles more a level.
Now talking about collision, notice that we're getting blocked here, and as we move on, we're going
to have to make sure that we handle collision.
Notice I just fell through the floor there.
We need to make sure we handle collision.
For example, this tile, if I right click and edit it, I can show simple collision and notice there
is none.
So I need to add a box simplified collision.
And then this corner has a problem as well, doesn't it?
If I edit the corner, notice that if I show simple collision it's this automatically generated collision.
I have to go to collision and remove collision and then handle that myself.
Now if you're just working on a level and you don't want to deal with adding collision holes, a cheat
is to search for complex and go to collision complexity and use complex collision as simple.
Now, I don't recommend you do this for a ship game.
For a ship game you should have collision halls.
But if you don't want to be bothered right now to add the collision halls yourself, you can always
use that.
Just keep in mind it can't move after that.
I'm just going to go ahead and really quickly add a collision hall for the corner here.
But just know that if you're kind of in a hurry and you need to get things prototyped and working,
you can use complex collision is simple.
I just don't recommend shipping a game, especially if it has a lot of polygons in the geometry itself.
But we're going to add a box simplified collision for this and just really quick going to bring it down.
I'm going to turn off snapping for scale and just bring this collision down.
I'm going to turn off snapping for translation as well.
And if you really care, you can put collision boxes for these parts here.
I'm not going to do that.
And I'll just put some really basic blocks on the edges as well.
So I'm going to add another box.
I'm going to scale it in.
I'm going to bring it over.
And then holding alt.
I'm going to duplicate that, rotate this by 90 degrees.
And bring this over here.
So this is going to give me a pretty good basic geometry.
And if I go ahead and press play.
Now I see that I can.
Run up to the edge.
So we're just going to want to make sure that our collision is set properly.
And that none of the geometries we use are going to make us fall through.
And it looks like this one here needs some geometry.
So really quickly, I'm going to edit this.
I'm going to time lapse it as I do so.
Okay.
So now that I think all of my geometry has collision holes and I should not be blocked by anything and
I shouldn't be prevented from running around, I shouldn't fall through the floor or anything like that.
Hopefully I don't fall through the floor as I say that.
Now we can continue with our post-process volume now that we have some more contrast and we can compare
the colors, I think it's always good.
Don't work with monochrome all one shade as you're messing with your post-process volume and all of
these new tiles here can go into my dungeon folder, my dungeon meshes folder.
I can just drag them right into dungeon meshes there.
That's going to make things a little bit easier to manage.
Okay, so let's click on Post-process volume and finish up the Post-process volume.
Let's make sure things look pretty good and even for a little more contrast, we can just go to assets,
characters, aura and animations and just bring in her idle animation here just so we can see what aura
looks like in the world as we're doing this as well.
So there's aura we can compare the colors there.
Okay, so post-process volume, let's go through it and make sure we have things set the way we want
them.
Now, I usually skip the bloom.
We've already handled exposure.
I'm going to scroll down to temperature and for temperature type, I'm going to use color temperature.
That way I can set this temperature value and we can just kind of change its value.
If you go to the extremes, you can see that the level is going to get much more red or much more blue,
right?
I'm kind of going for a bluish tint for this level, so I don't want to go too crazy with this.
A lower temperature looks kind of cool.
It's a little bit grayer, like we have some gray skies, but I'm going to go a little more into the
higher temperatures.
I'm going to use about 7500.
And for the tint, again, play with this and see how the tent will change those colors a bit.
I'm going to go up but slightly like really slightly 0.1, slightly.
And even that has a noticeable change now, right under temperature we have global and these are some
really nice ways to change just how your colors pop.
You know, if you're looking at this and you're saying this is a little too dark or it's not really
contrasted enough, these global settings are a good place to start.
I'm going to check saturation so we can override saturation and we can just kind of see what things
look like.
I usually like to go up on the saturation a little bit.
It's easy to go overboard and make this look really bad so I don't go too far, not much farther than
0.05 away from one.
And we can also change the color just a bit.
I do go to the extremes when I'm looking at what it looks like, but then I kind of just stick close
to the center if I change that color at all.
So a little more on the saturation.
The contrast too can go up a little bit.
I usually go up by about 0.05.
So again, drag it around and look, I like this saturation a little bit higher, but not much.
And again, you can check out those colors as well.
The saturation doesn't really need much on the color, but a little bit on the blue side.
Gamma is another good way to kind of make things pop or brighten them a bit.
I usually go a little bit darker on the gamma 0.950.96 or so.
And you know, again, don't need to change the color too much, but if you do, I'm going to go a little
bit into sort of the yellowish colors.
And I'm noticing I kind of do like my saturation a little bit better when it's kind of more into the
magenta quadrant.
Okay.
Scrolling back down, I typically don't mess with gain and offset.
You can though, and the shadows are a nice way to do all of these adjustments.
But for specifically the shadows, I really don't go too crazy with these.
I'm going to do about 1.04 for the contrast and perhaps a little bit bluish on the color.
I said contrast.
This is saturation 1.04 for saturation.
For contrast, I go even less 1.01 or so for Gamma.
Again, I like to go a little bit on the darker side.
So about 0.9 there.
We have a little bit darker for the shadows and for the gain.
I like to go a little bit on the darker side for the gain as well.
So something like 0.97, it's really easy to go overboard with these.
With the Midtones, I barely touch it.
Maybe saturation 1.041.05.
Contrast also a little bit on the lower side.
.95 or so.
And just taking a look up close at Aura, making sure that I really am okay with these colors.
And if I'm not, I can go back and change things a bit with a more cartoony looking, stylized look.
It's really nice to have a bit of a higher saturation, but it's easy to go too far, so I might go
1.08 for the saturation there and all the way back up here for Global, we'll go about one point.
1.1.
Okay, so that's global and shadows.
We got some midtones highlights I rarely touch.
That's just, you know, changing the highlights can make it look a little bit too crazy, a little
bit over tampered with.
I'm going to leave those alone.
One kind of cool effect is the film grain.
If we scroll down to film grain, you can add some film grain if you want that sort of film grainy look,
take it all the way up.
If you want to see what film grain does.
It's just this sort of grainy texture over everything I like a little bit, but I tend to not really
go too crazy with it.
0.0110.015 is generally enough for me.
So after all that, we can now see that with the post-process effects, I feel like things are looking
a bit better.
We don't have any light sources or anything yet.
So it's this is basically the dark of our dungeon.
This is how dark it's going to be at the darkest.
You know, I haven't created a torch actor with a point light on it or anything like that.
We could drag in a point light if we wanted to see what a point light looks like in our dungeon, you
know, perhaps change its color to a little bit softer of a glow.
And we could see what that kind of looks like.
Ideally it would be pulsing with that flame will take care of that later.
But there we go.
We can see what it looks like there with a point light and I've got my settings at maximum.
So what I'm going to do as I'm developing is turn those scalability settings down a bit.
I'm on Epic for everything.
I'm going to go down to high and that should help me out a little bit there.
And if that's too much, I can even go down to Medium.
So change that if you're getting some issues with your performance as well.
Okay, so this is looking good.
I'm liking what I see.
I think I'm going to want a nice actor for my torch or my flame pillar so that I can see some pulsing
dynamic lighting in the world and see what that looks like.
And we'll add some geometry so that as we're testing, we'll get some obstacles and learn how to deal
with those.
So great job in this video and always with this level design stuff.
Feel free to make it your own.
You don't have to copy me exactly, but if you do, that's okay too.
So excellent job and I'll see you in the next video.