I've started to take a serious look at Unreal. Here is a small prototype I've been working on in order to explore how to work in the engine:
I started with a cartoon dog model I had made some time ago. I re-rigged and weighted it and made a few animations (idle, run, jump) to start with. For the hook up in Unreal I used a lot of the information in this series of tutorials:
Unreal 3rd Person Tutorial
but I changed a few things around when I wasn't getting the animation quality I was looking for, specifically with the anticipation in the jump.
The environment is still in the experimental blocking phase - I just made a landscape, a water plane, a tree, and a rock in Maya and used them to very roughly create a little scene. Most likely the layout of this will change completely as I add actual game play features.
The water shader came originally from this site:
UnrealtySimon
and I changed it to flow constantly in one direction rather than going from side to side.
So far this has been quite fun. I am impressed with the level of documentation and support you can get in Unreal; and I generally like its animation features.
