Have you ever wondered how to make a video game asset from start to finish? This tutorial covers the creation of fully destructible crates using only the freely available tools Blender, Krita, and Unreal Engine.
Step 1 – Make a Crate With Blender
We start by creating the crate mesh in Blender. We do this by slightly insetting all 6 faces of a cube. The new faces in the center of each side have to be slightly extruded inwards after that.
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The crate has be hollow to support the destruction effects within Unreal Engine. Therefore we create a 2nd cube and move it inside our crate. The cube has to be scaled down to be slightly smaller than our crate. We can then use a Boolean modifier to remove the insides of the crate.
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Uniform meshes can look pretty boring. I recommend you to add imperfections to the mesh by creating a couple of loop cuts and moving some vertices around using proportional editing. This gives the mesh a bit of character which works great in a low-poly environment.
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Open up the UV-Editing screen and add a new image with a size of 256×256. Save that image to a file called ‘CrateTex.png’. Select the entire mesh and export the UV-Layout to different file. Create and name a material. Assign it to your crate. Link the base color of the material as a image texture to the newly created image. If you switch the shading mode of your viewport to material preview, your box should appear all black – just like the created texture.
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Step 2 – Use Krita To Make a Texture
Import the UV-Layout into Krita with a canvas size of 256×256. Create a new layer beneath the UV-Layout and fill the background with a darker brown. Select the square areas in the center and paint them in a lighter tone. Feel free to add some details like a text saying ‘FRAGILE’ or paint an arrow pointing up.
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The Texture The UV-Layout
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Step 3 – Create a Destruction Effect In Unreal Editor
Create a new First-Person blueprint project in Unreal Editor. Import the created FBX and the texture by simply dragging the corresponding icons into the editor.
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Click on the imported static mesh and click on ‘Create Destructible Mesh’.
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Place the box in the level by dragging the actor into the viewport. Shoot at it.
Step 4 – Make It More Interesting
- position crates in different sizes and rotations around the level
- add particle and sound effects when a crates are destroyed
- create explosive barrels that are capable of destroying surrounding crates
- improve your skills in Blender to create complex objects
- learn about basic rendering techniques to implement interesting features
Hope that helps.