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Unreal Introductions
House Greybox
During my introduction to all the basic aspects of Unreal Engine, one of my first task was to build a house (greybox a house)
The first port of call was to remove all of the green objects within the level. As to avoid confusion I wanted a flat surface to work with.
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I can keep the floor to save time.
Navigating to the meshes folder I can find some shapes to use as building blocks, I'm going to use the SM_Chamfer Cube as my walls and the SM_Ramp as my Roof.
For starters I'll just make one floor with zero windows to see how it looks.
It's hard to see as it doesn't show up well in the image of the completed house. But a annoying problem has appeared, where there were these little gaps where light made it's way through which is not intended.
I discovered a way to fix it. Click the button below & navigate to House Greyboxing to see my solution.
Aside from that though as you can see I made the house larger and added windows, it's a rather dull looking house but I think it paints the picture. I think looking at it you would automatically assume it's a house.
The added size does translate to a second floor just so you are aware.
REFLECTION
Greyboxing was interesting as it felt very much like playing with Lego. The way you connect everything is the same feeling, unlike Lego I didn't have a ordered construction manual so it was down to trial and error or making things fit correctly in a way that made sense.
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My problem with the gaps has shown me that you need to be considerate about the shapes you're using because of unintended effects of using the wrong ones such as the gaps and also how people interrupt the scene.
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Targets for me next would be working with some lighting, along with using references.
Material Editor
Using the material editor I want to create 3 different kinds of materials to show a range of what I can do with it
Something Rough
Something Smooth
Something Glossy
Let's start with something rough. For that I think I am going to use a grey colour. When I think of roughness I imagine rocks and those tend to be grey
This is the colour I've gone for. I put the Base Colour value at 0.2 as that seemed to be the right value for the colour I was wanting.
I maxed out the roughness at a value of 1 but to me the material looks smoother than I imagined. I believe I was told roughness is how much light the material allows through.
The next material I'll be doing is smooth how can I make it smooth? Obviously I need to turn down the roughness to 0. I think I'll go for a gold colour this time around.
Turning down the roughness to 0 has made it a bit too glossy for me so I am actually going to adjust it and see how it changes.
Not sure how well the change shows in this image but I have found my sweet spot of 0.2 roughness now it's smooth but not too glossy.
Lastly we have the glossy material for which I will use red. I think the best way to do this will be 0 roughness with a hint of metallic say 0.2.
For this glossy material I did 0.3 metallic, 1 specular and 0 roughness and it seems to look good.
Here's what it all looks like when applied in a level
REFLECTION
Using the material editor was surprisingly a breeze, it was very friendly to use as a beginner. I feel that almost everything went splendidly. I understood it and it didn't take me all that long.
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The only issue that springs to mind is the rough material I made, I think I might not really understand what a rough material is or I did that wrong since it didn't turn out how I imagined it at all.
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Not really sure how to achieve this but going forward I would like to learn a bit more about how the material settings work beyond what I currently understand.
Street Lamp Programming
One of the numerous tasks for my Unreal Engine introduction is street lamp programming. Unfortunately, I have no memory of the lesson and hence have no memory of how to program a street lamp.
Learning to do it again I consulted the YouTube search bar and found "Lighting for Beginners in Unreal Engine 5" (Unreal, 2025)
Firstly we have a few types of lights: point lights, spot light, rect light. The only one however, relevant to my purposes is spot light. Using the Lumen lighting system.
I had problems with the light auto adjusting which was fixed by disabling auto exposure.
https://youtu.be/sw5qv4emXqM?si=jbTDLI8Oj23Eh-tW
