Lords of the Fallen, Graveyard (Map recreation)

This was my first step into the Unreal Engine 4. At college the only engine exposure I had was in the CryEngine 3 and GameMaker so this was a whole new experience. First I chose a map I had a familiarity with; at the time I had been playing a lot of Lords of the Fallen so I decided to remake the graveyard within which you fight the third boss of the game (The Worshiper). 

The first thing I had to do was create the landscape to build the level on and form the basic features. I then blocked out the basic geometry of the game assets.

I downloaded some free assets from turbosquid.com and imported them into Maya so I could lower the poly count of the higher detail ones and cut any unnecessary parts off and exported the completed versions to UE4 and positioned them accordingly.

After I had all of the major objects laid out in the scene I deleted the place-holder blocks and was able to sculpt the landscape to better fit the models and reflect the game level more accurately.

I created a landscape height map to texture the terrain.

Then I created a 'landscape hole' texture so that I could easily add and remove the texture at will, I did this by duplicating the material and adding a visibility mask.

I created the church/mausoleum out of props from the Unreal Editor however when I textured it all of the walls had different sized textures, this was because the props had been re-sized. To fix this issue I remade the entire thing using the 'box brush' this was so I could scale the textures.

I created a blueprint system to active a lever in the map so the player could open the gate. First I created a blueprint for each gate to set the gate's location and then another blueprint on the left gate to open both the gates at the same time.

Next I created the blueprint for the lever itself. In this blueprint I had to create new public variables that were references to the other 2 blueprints of the gates.

I set a trigger volume in the components tab, then in the event graph I made sure that the blueprint could only be activated if the player moved inside the area of the trigger volume, then I made sure that the blueprint would only fire if the player hits ‘E’ on the keyboard. I made a second blueprint that detected the player's press of the button.

I added more detailed assets to the level such as graves, trees, candles and rocks. To recreate the in-game portals I used the ‘Elemental Demo’ from the Unreal Editor Marketplace and the migrated a ‘sigil’ particle effect from the demo into my scene, combing the sigil with default rocks allowed me to recreate it well.(My version left, in game version right) 

I also migrated over a snow particle effect from the same demo so that I could use them to create the same atmosphere and weather as in the game.

I then created lighting in my level, I did this by adding ‘fire’ particle effects from the content browser to the tops of the candles, I then added point lights, reflection spheres and lightmass importance volumes . I also added player blocking volumes around the level.

To finish off the level I created the background so the player couldn't see off into space. To do this I migrated a mountain from the Elemental Demo and altered it's transform and duplicated it many times, altering each one so the mountain-scape was seamless. To create the 'Demon Claw Mountain' i used the default rocks and placed them accordingly.

Finally here is the comparisons between the final version of my level and the in game level.