Aelinor Outside And Inside

22 January 2025

Another VERY good day, so far. Today I wanted to try to add an image of the outside of Aelinor itself to the game. (Aelinor is the cathedral-like structure made from merged, ancient soul trees.)

This is the image that I created using DALL-E, right at the beginning of the project:

If this project had been longer, I would have like to try creating Aeilinor itself as a 3D object, but because that was outside the scope of the project, I wanted to at least try to put this image on a big wall, to see how it looked in UE5.

In the end I managed to do it just by trial and error. I imported a JPG file into the content drawer, then dragged it onto a big flat wall shape:

When I tested it in Play mode, the effect was brilliant! Because everything is rendered in 2D on the screen, it actually looked like Aelinor was a great big structure that the character could approach. 

This was my best moment of the whole project:

The only problem was that the other side of the wall was identical to the front - so Aelinor had two outsides and no inside!

...which meant that I had to look for a tutorial on how to put different images/textures on different sides of an object. I found one here:

That gave me enough clues to play with UE5 so that I made the other sie of the wall just a plain wooden pattern:

This was the main level of the game - the laboratory inside Aelinor, where the player would have to mix a potion to save Aelinor.