My race level - Now with particle systems!

Been making some new particle systems, and I felt like seeing how they look in my level! It's all greybox so far, and I'm not done with all of the particles I plan on including, but this video should give an idea on how I'm planning to have them work in game!


As you can see, I currently have a steam emitter, a smoke emitter, fire, and a spark emitter blueprint. More coming soon as well as footage of my level as I progress!

Exploring Particles!

For the past week, I've been messing with particles for the first time... well, ever! They're awesome!

Most of the time I've spent following Zak Parrish's tutorials for Cascade in UE4 on Youtube (which, by the way, are totally awesome and you should check them out if you're also new to particles). However, after going through a bunch of those, I thought it would be high time to test out my own skills with something a bit more advanced.

For my racing level, I'm planning on including a variety of particle effects, ranging from fire to steam, dust to smoke. Doing a little bit of reasearch for each one, I deducted that the most complicated of them all would be the fire. Perfect! I found my starting point. In the video below, you'll see that a gentleman has set up a prime example of what I'd like to reproduce inside of UE4.

See? Fire is cool! Particles are cool! What happens when we combine the two? How do we combine the two? Well, the folks over at ImbueFX have provided a great free tutorial on how do do such a thing.

I used this tutorial as a guide as well as examining some of the already existing fire effects in UE4's libraries to make my own fire. It's currently a work in progress, as I haven't yet added smoke or sound effects, but so far, I'm really happy with how it's coming along! You can check it out below. Right now, it consists of the main licks of fire, combined with the embers which use the orbit function to circle around the flames in interesting variations.

Bam! There it is.

Here's how the effect currently looks in Cascade.

Here's the guts of the main flame material. Squint your eyes!

And these are the guts of the Ember material.

What's this?

And that about wraps everything up for now! I'll be sure to post the finished product when I'm all done with it. Until next time!

Researching for a Racing Level Pitch

Here at Ringling, we're getting prepared to pitch our ideas for our racing level that we'll be working on for the majority of this semester. Over the past few days, I've thought about what I wanted to do quite a bit.

I've decided that the setting for my racing level will be Titan, the largest natural satellite of Saturn. I reached this decision as the creative liberties offered by Titan as well as the opportunities for hazards and interesting environment elements are many!

Being that Titan is covered with a thick atmosphere which is rich in methane, giving off a brilliant blue hue when viewed from certain angles. In addition to this, the ground is a deep, rusted orange, which pairs nicely with the blue light emitted from methane. It was here when I first settled on a few options for my color scheme.

As you can see, the warmer tones will cover the many ranges of colors found on the surface and in different parts of the atmosphere of titan, and the cool blue tones will cover the methane lakes and reflected light from the atmosphere.

I initially had some trouble with determining how I wanted to represent the surface of Titan, being that it shares a lot of similarities with Earth. I decided to use a little bit of artistic freedom and drew up some rocks that looked a little alien at first glance.

The locale for the racing level on Titan will be an old, dilapidated space station that has been repurposed and revived by scavengers, gamblers, crime lords, and other shady folk. Over time, the place has become quite the popular destination, and is especially known for its specialty of hosting matches for the "Interplanetary Space Racers", a league with questionable legalities.

To make this place look awesome, I looked at a number of artists work and photos from around the globe and beyond. One of my go-tos is the work of the late Ralph McQuarrie, the original concept artist for Star Wars.

I've always been a big fan of the architecture from the Mos Eisley Spaceport, and I thought that something in that vein would be quite fitting for the buildings in my level. If i were to go with a more contemporary science fiction style, I'd probably go with something like the following.

As for the location of the buildings themselves, I thought that having them located on the side of a cliff like the monastery seen below would be pretty interesting.

So, without further ado, here's a very work in progress top down view of what I currently have planned for my track!

And a landmark to boot!

Here's a little bit more on how the stunt above will work exactly!

As you can see in the diagram, there are different tiles on the old satellite which will fall when driven on. This means that the next time the player comes around for their second lap the path will be changed, forcing the player to take an alternate route when traveling along the satellite. Additionally, there will be boosts on the satellite to not only guide the player, but to give them enough velocity to launch the full distance of the jump.

I have just about every beat of the map marked down in the following thumbnails. I had fun with these!

Anyways, I'm really excited to see how this all turns out soon! Thanks for reading :)

Programming Basic Platformer Traps in Blueprint

Hey everybody! Been hard at work learning how to make some awesome stuff with Blueprint in Unreal 4. Our latest task in Programming class was to make a Thwomp-like spiky death trap for our platformers!

After figuring out the ins and outs of getting such a thing to function within my level, I created a series of challenges to test out the guy. Check it all out in the video below!


I find programming in Blueprint to be a lot of fun! This trap combined a lot of the concepts we had learned previously in class as well as introducing some new ones. In addition to creating a trigger box that would activate upon Grandpa Mario entering it, I programmed the "face" of the block to change colors in accordance to its movements as well as making the camera shake upon impact. Some of it was a little challenging to grasp at first, but I enjoyed figuring it out and am excited for what's to come.

You can check out the finished and commented blueprint below! (Though you might have to click on it to see all the juicy deets.)

Anyways, that about wraps it all up for this one. Thanks for reading!