Unreal Engine

Since I had talked about moving from Hammer, to Unreal 4 for the game engine I will be using, that is what I have worked on. Over the last week I have spent some time researching the new game engine, watching lots of videos of what it can do, and tutorials on getting started. I did bring in one of my cities as a test, to see how the engine will work with importing what I already have. 

I discovered that the free version of SketchUp I am currently using does not allow me to export to the file format I need. For that I would need to get Pro, which I would have to pay for. It is not a lot of money for a year student license, but not something I currently have the funds to snatch up. So I had to find a way to get the format I needed, so that the Unreal engine could read my SketchUp models. This involved saving my SketchUp files, and opening them in Blender, another 3D modeling program. Blender is free and does allow me to export into the format I need, which is a .fbx file.

The process was relatively simple, and only slightly more time consuming than if I could have taken it straight from SketchUp to Unreal 4. Below is the test city I brought in, to see how it would look in the new game engine. I discovered that I will have to bring in each "building" separately, since I currently had them as one file, and discovered that it does not allow for movement between the buildings, there is an invisible wall created by the program. So as I continue on I will have to save every city I have so far, and break them up into individual buildings. That is what I will be working on in the coming weeks. 

Since the cities will be deconstructed further, into individual buildings, I'm going to explore mixing all of the buildings together into a massive city. I do not know how they will work together, since they all come from different deconstructions, however I think it will be of interest to explore.