Shooter Game Tutorial: Prototype - Creating Basic Scene

First of all we need an concept. Player will be standing in the middle of the corridors and he won't be able to move.

Open your project and create new default level. Place your architecture meshes like in paint draw below.

Player Start should be in the middle and pointing to L1 meshes. After placing meshes build lighting and check out if your UV channels are OK.

Some elements will need glow meshes. Place EL2_Glows mesh in the location of EL2.

- Drop EL2_Glows inside level,
- Lock Detail panel of placed glows, thanks to that you can select other actors in the scene without updating details info,

- Now select EL2 and press F4 this will bring up details panel in new window. Copy location from EL2 to EL2_Glows,
- Do the same with other EL2 and EL1 glows,

- You can group those meshes or create blueprint for later usage,

Next add some props to near player start. I've added boxes, barrels and core.

In Engine/EngineVolumetrics/LightBeam/Mesh there are useful light beams that you can place near your lights.

You can improve this material by adding some smoke animation.

It will look like that:

To do that you will need T_Smoke_Tiled_D texture from Cave Showcase from Epic. Basically you should download all of the Epic Showcases and copy assets to your content.

When copying content from other project be sure to have the same folder structure. You can't rename folders because references will broke. I have copied Content Example, Cave and Reflections to my game, there is a lot of useful assets there, and you can use it in free or commercial games.

Next we will add smoke particles. I'm using Example Content assets. Prepared particle can be found here (I've changed couple of things to get this working on mobile): https://www.dropbox.com/s/pd4jnsfohq30ajh/FX.rar just copy it to your Game/Content. You can change particle color in material but you can create Particle Color variable and change that in cascade as well, just check out the particle material.

When placing materials with alpha make sure that they aren't near player/view because they can make your performance really bad on Mobile.

Ok so we have almost everything. Now we need to make the scene visible on Mobile Preview.

Remember: we are doing mobile game first so please use Mobile Preview when testing your scene. There is couple of things that we will prepare different way to have good quality on PC.

Atmospheric Fog

If you don't have any Atmospheric Fog your scene place one.

Here's my properties:

Box Reflection Capsule
Remove any other reflection capsules from your level. Place one Box Reflection Capsule near Player Start. Here's my properties:

Basically there is a problem with reflections on Mobile. That's why you should have only one placed. I've posted about this in Answer Hub - will update this later.

ExponentialHeightFog

Place it on your level. This fog will work on Mobile. Here's my properties:

PostProcessVolume

This is important we need to disable couple of PP effect. Place it on your level and make it big so it will be surrounding your scene. My properties:

LensFlare intensity should be 0

Ambient Occlusion intensity should be 0

DOF should be disabled

MotionBlur amount should be 0

Screen Space Reflections intensity should be 0

Lighting

The most important lights will be Directional Lights. You should put 4 of them and they should be Static.

Rest of the scene should be lighted with Point Lights with Static Mode. I've one Stationary Point Light near PlayerStart to light up hands and weapon.

Take couple of days to work around with lighting. You have all necessary information how to start. Check out UE4 lighting documentation as well!

Reflections

The last part is reflections. To your Atlas_sf add this:

You will need T_Floor_Tiles_D texture from Reflection Showcase to be able to do that. (this is the texture bottom left of the screen)

How it will look like now?

Before