Erebus Weekly - Week 004 - 03.17.2017
Welcome to the Erebus Weekly, Week 004. Work started on some UI love. Well, love and hate. I've been looking ahead towards character design workflows, and getting characters into Unreal Engine from makehuman is a goal. Adobe/Mixamo decided to "drop" support for Unreal Engine, probably because they love Unity or some shit (I don't actually know, I just assume the worst). So I won't supporting that toolchain/process/madness anymore. Plus, makehuman is pretty frickin' sweet. I was using it years ago, and am glad to see it's still around.
EGT UI
Let me tell ya, UMG is pretty interesting. A lot of gotchas and far too many different ways to lay out your UI. I knew this was going to be a lot of work, so finally bit the bullet and started working on it. I have always been a fan of minimalism in graphic design, and that style fits the goals in developing Erebus Game Template. I looked to Google's Material Design specs for inspiration, as I agree with a lot of their design choices.
I didn't want to completely mirror the Material specs, but definitely wanted to pull some of the bits out. One of those, being their vast icon library. This in itself turned out to be a beast. Unreal Engine, at least outside of raw C++, doesn't support drawing the unicode characters to produce the icons. You can however, copy the character itself... sorta. My first attempt at making an easy-to-use UMG icon solution, was to utilize the newly introduced (as of 4.15) map (or dictionary, TMap if you've been using C++ in UE). I hoped to add in key/value pairs into an "IconMap" variable, with a name that mirrored Google's naming convention, for each icon. An issue arose though, which I should probably work up a bug report for. It seemed that any more than 7 key/value pairs in the map just... stopped working. At least I think that's what was exploding.
Rather than pull my hair any longer trying to figure this issue out, I moved over to another solution. A community driven web-font based on the original Material Design icon set exists, which adds a plethora of new custom icons. One of the cool things they supply with the download, is a handy click-n-copy icon cheatsheet page, which is currently sitting in EGT's documentation folder for quick reference. When I'm doing any UI work and want to add an icon, I can just open that reference, find an icon I want to use, and copy/paste it into a UMG text widget that references the icon web-font.
Again, probably sounds more complicated than it really is. One thing that is a bit tedious, is caused by the sheer amount of icons available. I wanted to have a UMG demo widget that had all the icons displayed, but right now that means copying and pasting some 900+ items. I'll eventually make a script of some sort to automate this process. For now, this works and it's awesome to have a clean and large library of icons available. Plus, it's all font-based, so (I think) things run faster than if I were to use tons of textures, materials, or sprites to power the icon library. Another lovely side-effect of using a font-based icon set? Scaling. Using bitmap-based icons will either have the damage of blurring an icon when scaling up, lot's of work to have break-points to swap out different sized icon images based on resolution, or hearing voices. Really distant voices, talking about brushing hair. Oh, wait... That was some ASMR playing in the background. So creepy...
Another thing I pulled from the Material Design specs were the color palettes. I created structures and enums, as well as saved palettes in UE's color picker for each swatch set. It'll be handy to be able to quickly pick complementary colors, and I'll probably eventually do themes as well for faster iterations on UI madness. I'm also loosely adhering to some of the specs laid out for colors such as light on dark, dark on light, etc. You can find some of that stuff here, for example.
Character Design Chaos
One of the bigger parts of a game, are it's characters. Even a basic puzzle game will have characters, right? Well EGT is by default humanoid-centric, and while I have man-crush on Manny the Mannequin, one of the things I wanted to push towards was our own in-house generic character. Not to be so cool and original, but rather to lay down the workflow process for getting characters out of a powerful tool and into UE, that was accessible for everyone. Any character development process is going to lengthy, so keep that in mind if you happen to jump on this bandwagon.
While it was pretty easy to fire up the alpha/beta/gamma of Adobe Fuse, export to Mixamo, package some animations, then get a basic character running around in UE, this toolchain was never destined to last. So we're moving over to an open-source toolset for this part of production. Outside of some Photoshop useage, we are nearly using a completely-free toolset for all of our design and development. Hell, we could ditch Photoshop and use any number of alternatives... But I just can't let her go.
Anyways, enter makehuman. MH does pretty much everything Adobe Fuse does, and more. It's more akin to Poser/Daz3D in it's character detail. Plus, they apparently have some early support for Unreal Engine export options right now. I'm certain that support will grow as more people check makehuman out for their character design workflows.
Now, I've yet to actually get a character rigged up and running around, though I have exported meshes/materials and had those imported and looking pretty. Hopefully within the next couple of weeks I'll have this process down. I noticed there were a couple of tutorials floating around, so if you're intested, take a crack at it! You may or may not regret it.
That Outro Though...
Sorry/not sorry for droning on so much this week. There was actually plenty more to blather on about, such as some happenings with Ultra Puck Battle. Alas, we'll save those juicey bits for next week or whatever. Until then, make sure to drink fluids. Because drinking solids just never pans out.