I knew the next assets I needed to make would be houses for the village and for these I needed new materials that were not RED instead I chose normal wooden colors but I still used the original Red wood template and added extra colors and changed the originals to be brown I made a dark wood for trim and a light wood for everything else as well as a tree bark one for the trees I would make.
For the houses, I decided to try and learn a new skill in the form of geometry nodes which takes items like a 1M x 1M x 1M cube and procedurally places them in since a way that you can even make houses just by sliding some attribute sliders this is an advanced skill and I’ve been meaning to learn it for a while and at first, I understood what was going on and I got it to realize what was a corner and what was a middle wall then I managed to get it to understand what was roof edge and roof middle but after that, it became so complicated I managed to get it to look like a fast-food restaurant this was not what I was going for so I scrapped the learning and decided on another method.
To therefore create the houses I took the idea from geometry nodes to make modules in 1m x 1m x 1m cubes so that I could just copy and paste the parts to make a few variants of the house in the end there were 12+ pieces that I could copy and paste to make the four houses you see below.
I also decided that the village needed a streetlamp so I quickly modeled one of those and gave it a Japanese style the last thing I did was model a cherry blossom tree so that there would be some foliage in the village.
I asked my team member Sophie to make me a cherry blossom drawing that was alpha ready meaning a PNG so I could scatter it onto the model of a cherry blossom tree as this is an effective method of making trees and saving on performance I don’t know of any other way to make trees as of right now although I’m sure there are better ways for doing it I have heard tales of Scattering just an image file of a full tree to save on space but this is for blender only and not unreal.
I imported all the models into Unreal to see how they worked and since I had created the houses from modules I only really needed to import one or 2 but ended up importing them all anyway I just didn’t take screenshots of all four.
Importing the cherry blossom tree was a problem as the FBX file I was using to export the model didn’t contain the ALPHA map information for some reason I googled my issue many times but could not find an answer to how to package that into the file so I had to rely on creating a black and white mask and told my team member Kyran to add it in himself when he imported the model of the tree into Unreal as you can see below it works this way even if it’s not efficient.
HOUSE
Culture Trip. 2022. Traditional House. [online] Available at: <https://theculturetrip.com/asia/japan/articles/where-to-find-traditional-japanese-architecture-in-tokyo/> [Accessed24 April 2022].
