Jungle Level Design

 Hey!  This month a great asset pack is free on the unreal marketplace.  So I decided I would take it and make something with it.  I wanted to make some type of aztec ruins where the player is overlooking a vast Jungle.  This is planned to be used in another prototype I have been working on.  Something with exploration of some ruins.  So I decided I would get started just by sketching out what I wanted.

I started off with a simple sketch to get a general layout in my head of what I wanted the player to see and focus on with some set dressing around it.

After this I decided to just block it out in Unreal:

I made sure to map out the player area in black.  Since this is a VR game, I wanted to make sure where the player could reach right away.  I don't often like to utilize teleporting so this helps me build things in reach of the player.

I laid out major landmarks in white cubes such as the player cliff, the Aztec temple, and rocks to block player view to the end of the world.  For the rest, I labeled green for the jungle.

After I was done with the greyboxing, I made sure to model the cliff the player was on.  I had a specific shape for the player and I wanted to cut a hole that the player platform will descend into.

I made this shape very quickly in maya.  I moved some faces and vertices around to make it look more cliff like.  I did all of this while matching the scale of the shapes I had put in unreal to make sure things lined up when I put them in.

With that, I was ready to  sculpt and vertex paint the cliff side in Unreal.  I decided to use Quixel since their awesome 4K library is open to Unreal devs.  Though I did have to adjust the streaming pool size of the engine since I exceeded the limit.

I also did little landscape and spline work for a river.

Afterwards, it all came together like this.

Side Note:  I really wanted to do some video recording, but UE4.25 seems to have a bug where the video is zoomed and stretched.  This is weird since I did a ton of VR recording in 4.24 no problem.  Hopefully it will be patched in the future.

This was a fun project I did over the weekend just to utilize a free pack and see where it took me in terms of a potential prototype.  I'm happy with how things turned out.  Looking forward to what this turns into!