Placing Megascan Assets
We are going to start brining in Megascan assets and blocking out our level. We’re going to head back over into the quixel bridge and start adding some 3D assets.
We are going to look under Nature>Rocks>Mossy. If you click in an object on the details panel on the right you will see size. So we want the scale of the object to be the proper size to the scale we are working with in our scene. We can scale up or down, but there is a limit. Closed means a model is 3D scanned and 100% filled. If it was open you could see through it and and not a full model. If you see assembly it means a lot of pieces were put together to create it.
In level design we want to create the largest pieces first and work our way to small. So we will start with objects larger than 8 meters. To start with the large cliff pieces.
So go back to the rock category and select cliff so we will have some different pieces to work with. We’re going to select the forest rock walls and download it at nanite quality and add them to our level.
Nanite creates dynamic LOD( Level of details) on the fly.
A material Instance is a child of a material with attributes we can modify of our material without it effecting the parent.
So place a few of the static meshes together to try to create a scene.
Now it does not blend together perfectly, but the rock formations do look good together so let’s start changing some of the colors to help us blend into something more seamless.
Let’s take the S_Quarry_Cliff_uchoab3fa_high and see about changing it’s color so go to the asset and open up the material instance.
Now that is open we can go into the details panel and we want to edit the albedo tint. So check the box and click on it. This will open a color picker.
We edited the albedo tint to our rocks and now they are starting to look closer together in color.
Now for our scene we want to add collisions to our assets. So open the static meshes and open up Window>Convex Decomposition settings. We can select apply and it it will generate a general collisions based on the shape of the mesh. You could even go in higher details if you increase the numbers, but this is a powerful calculation depending on how high you go.
We are not going to assume that players will be climbing these rocks. They are just blocking players from leaving the level. The numbers we will be using are not going to be super high and complex.
Go through and apply the collisions to the rocks we are using. Press play and test the collisions to make sure they are working properly.
We now are going to block out our scene.
You will notice as we build out our level you will have scale, rotate, and change locations for new objects and duplicates. You will also notice our shadowing and lighting will need some work on down the line as well.
Next we’ll be working on secondary details and design.