3-D Game Engines and Tutorials
Demo Reels
Unreal 4 has tutorials that will teach you how to build stuff that looks like this. For this lecture, I reviewed some of their tutorials. They are several gigabytes worth of stuff. The Unreal engine, because it works in 3 dimensions, is a lot more complex than Photoshop. In contrast, here we have the plain old ordinary Photoshop interface, which has at least 1000 functions in it.
I am going to show you a game that was built with the Unreal engine. Some demos are not as cool as this one. Sometimes, a company puts everything it has into the demo version, and it sells, but when you install the product on your computer, you can't quite use it. I did not find that to be true of Unreal, although the game engine has a steep learning curve.
Some game engines use the term "room" instead of "map" to depict a 3-D space. The term makes us think of an enclosed area where the action is to happen. It also reminds us of movie studios where a room is synonymous with the width of the camera angle. It helps imply that in terms of the character navigating from level to level, there must be something more difficult about the next level, even if it seems to be the same map. Some game engines differentiate between rooms and levels, and the terminology may not be standard from engine to engine.
Game studios build movies with the Unreal game engine. There is not a lot of difference between building a movie that is 120 minutes long and building animations that are 5 to 10 frames each, except for the amount of detail in each frame. We will talk about that more later, in the Rendering topic.
Someone who is really good at 3-D animation could probably see which map is which in this video, but I have not quite taken this one apart yet to do that. The interesting thing about this video is that there is one overarching theme, and it doesn't look like Pong to me. This one graphic element goes from the beginning to the end, or nearly the end. Take a look at this .