Natural Disaster Project

After being invited onto a research project involving Unreal Engine (UE), I knew I had to learn the program. Prior to joining, I had some basic experience in UE, but I was definitely underprepared. This project was made to help me learn the basics before going into actual research.

So, to start learning, I followed a tutorial series by Ask A Dev. In an attempt put off learning how to code with UE’s blueprints, I opted to figure out how to make the game's environment. Luckily, in 2020, I followed an 8-hour tutorial on how to craft landscapes in UE, so I was already familiar with creating landscapes. It was not too bad revisiting the UE5 landscape creator, and honestly, it’s a pretty solid tool overall. You can easily craft landscapes if you know what you want to achieve beforehand.



After making the terrain, I utilized the free Quixel assets on the Epic Marketplace (now Fab). During this process, I ran into issues with material textures and scaling on the building pieces, which was fun to figure out. Creating a custom transparent material for the glass was also nice to help reflect and prevent players from looking into the building and seeing its emptiness. During the project, this was definitely the most fun part for me.



Next was tackling the trigger boxes and creating the characters. I started with the more difficult of the two, which involved an exploding barrel due to a lightning strike and a player flying back and burning. First, I created a trigger box that activates when the player enters it. This triggers a series of events that involve enabling nanite particles, triggering animations, and shaking the camera. I used Mixamo to download a model and animations from ActorCore to make the character move. Importing the characters and creating the animations was not intuitive, and I wish the process were a little easier.



Final touches were made with Ultra Dynamic Sky, as I had absolutely no interest in coding a dynamic weather simulation. Their tool is really intuitive, and I think it is a must-have for UE. The last bit of the project involved coding some opening and closing doors, adding audio, and creating walking animations. Overall, for my first project, I feel like I learned a lot and ended up with a cool product!

Study #1

In mid-2024, I joined a research project to help with the research and help refine an Unreal Engine (UE) virtual reality (VR) simulation. The research project aimed to see if people’s empathy, altruism, courage, and physiological data, such as heart rate variability and respiratory rate, were correlated with how many individuals were saved in the simulation.

I take very little credit for the development side of the project, as the head research assistant had been working on this game for almost a year before I joined. He is also far more talented than I am at coding, so it was usually easier for me to do the graphical stuff while he focused on the technical/environment stuff. Through my previous learnings from my first project, I helped implement some cool weather and design choices I had learned to increase realism and made a realistic terrain for the tutorial level.



I first focused on organizing blueprints and assets, as they had gotten very messy. This was really beneficial in getting used to the blueprints and structure of the asset folders. Next, I changed some of the assets, while adding and removing some to help create a more realistic environment. Some of the assets had ridiculously high poly counts, which was not good because the simulation was running off his laptop. Next, I implemented Ultra Dynamic Sky and removed some of the old weather code that was present. I also opted to make the simulation occur at night, as I could use the light posts to help highlight where we wanted players to go. It was essential to ensure that players were efficient and knew the simulation's objectives, as we had invisible spheres set around each player to calculate their fight or flight response.



Next, I removed some of the particle effects, as they were very resource-intensive, and updated them with more realistic, less resource-intensive ones. Some of the objects did not have collision barriers, so I added those and a barrier to prevent players from escaping. Afterwards, I focused on the tutorial level, as our professor requested.



To ensure a good physiological baseline, I was tasked with changing the tutorial level to a calm nature scene. For this, I used Gaea 2.0, which you can find more information about here. This helped create a realistic terrain, which was then painted using materials from Brushify. Although not the most performant option, it made it very easy to create the landscape. Afterwards, I added deer, water, rocks, and vegetation to make the environment feel more realistic. Some slight revisions to the code were made to help with the abovementioned changes.



We ended up running over 50 participants and found that those with higher empathy held their breath during the natural disaster part of the simulation compared to the baseline section. It was also found that those with higher courage were less likely to flee. Those who held their breath also saved fewer individuals. We presented the findings at a psychological conference, and are hopefully getting published in the next year!

Study #2

Coming 2026 :D