Phase 4: What I’ll Need To Learn

So, I wanna make a 3D game within Unreal Engine 4 (might change that later to Unity 2018 (Edit: Yeah, most likely going to have to change it due to the differences in coding language)) huh? Well, there’s a lot of stuff that I’m going to need to understand and be able to do in order to make that happen. Here, I’ll list the ones I can think of and why I’ll need them

1. (Required: Portfolio) Zbrush

This is the main tool that many studios use for creating the high poly versions of their assets such as characters, and will serve me better than Blender for creating mine. While its silly to use Zbrush for everything, it’ll be invaluable for creating much higher quality character models and more interesting surface details on various props when used alongside the Substance suite.

2. (Required: Project) 3D Animation

I feel like this shouldn’t need explaining, but this is needed in order to get things to appear to move in response to controls. T-posing models no thank you.

3. (Required: Portfolio) Substance Painter

While I feel confident in my ability to use Substance Designer, I know that I’ll need to learn Painter to properly make use of the materials I make in Designer and to texture my assets to a professional level. The Substance suite is an industry standard now, and I’d like to make proper use of it. It’s required as it’ll be the best way to make the textures look good with my skills. Completely hand painted textures are something I’ll need to learn for the future, and thus is required for the project and portfolio.

4. (Required: Project) Coding Stuff

I’ll need to learn how to deal with the coding problems that arise within the project in order to tackle them swiftly. What this will entail specifically is hard to tell, but some more maths, algorithms and problem solving techniques are a good starting point. It’s pretty self explanatory as to its place in getting the project to work.

5. (Optional) Faster Concepting Methods

This project needs a whole heap of concepts done for it, and as such I need to learn and utilise faster concepting methods in order to create the concepts I need to model from. This was the bottleneck for my second semester project last year, and as such I recognise why its important to get this stuff done ASAP in order to meet deadlines without having to cut stuff from the final game. This is classified under optional due to the fact that I might just not be able to speed up my concepting techniques, and as such I might need to make some shortcuts or just modelling by eye.

6. (Optional) More of Photoshop

In order to touch up my UV mapped textures after creating them in Substance Painter, I’ll need to learn some more of Photoshop, as it is used for this in many professional projects. In some, its used to create the textures themselves, but for the purpose of this project, editing should be the limits of what I need it for. Its in optional as I intend to not need it, but I may well need it in order to fix any texture issues.

7. (Optional) Illustrator & After Effects

Any and all UI elements will need the use of both of these in order for them to look their best. I’ve got an idea for how I want the UI to look while animated, and I know it’ll need After Effects to pull off properly, alongside more than just the pen tool and blending effects in Illustrator. This is in the optional section as the effects that need it can be outsourced via the asset store, and as such no need to make them myself.

8. (Very Optional) Unreal Engine 4

In order to make use of the native Substance support and better lighting systems found within Unreal, I’ll need to learn both the engine’s editor and the C++ language that it uses for coding. Luckily, it features visual coding and C++ is similar to Unity’s C# coding language, meaning its more about learning the differences than starting again from scratch. This is now going to be something that I’ll need to consider more carefully, as having looked into the language, C++, I’m not sure that I’ll understand it well enough to make the mechanics that I want in the game. There are plugins that do what I need for Substance and for better lighting for Unity, so it might well be worth sticking with it due to experience despite my dislike for it.

9. (Very Optional) Sound Editing

Something that I might need to do is record and edit sounds for the game, and although the current plan is to get third party help with this, it might fall on me to do some of the recording myself if I want something to sound a particular way. Hopefully wont need this, however.

10. (Very Optional) Music Writing and Recording

This is something that I REALLY don’t want to need to learn, as its a big area that would need lots of time I don’t have to properly learn this. I really want to get a third party on board for this, as I do believe that such a task would be out of my depth to achieve during the coming semester.