Joewintergreen

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Posts posted by Joewintergreen

  6. Posted

    Meanwhile,

     

    But literally just before that,

    I don't think this is a contradiction. He's saying the conventional wisdom is don't ask for too much, and that he didn't ask for the whole amount he was going to need because it's so very difficult to know what that amount is going to be.

  7. Posted

    Yeah, I hypothesise that the level-designy parts of level editors have gotten less and less intuitive as a result of general lack of understanding amoung non-level designers (the ones making the tools) of what constitutes or facilitates a good level design process, and that the reason Hammer is such a good example of an editor that doesn't do that is it's probably the last major level editor designed by a level designer (Romero)

     

     

    edit: Also woooo my ladders are live 

     

    16447233725_b66546c12b_o.png

  8. Posted

    No way to make normal maps in UE4. Bitmap2Material is a cool program you could try to generate normal/pbr maps from textures.

     

    I don't think there's a way to add vertices to brushes with Unreal's bsp system. For anything much more complicated than boxes you probably are better off using a mesh. Re clicking and deleting stuff though, you can marquee select by holding (i think) ctrl and shift. Or ctrl and alt. Somethin' like that. 

     

    Cgtextures.com is an awesome place to get photo sources for textures, and then you really just gotta make them tile seamlessly (use the offset filter in photoshop and then edit out the seams however you want). Most textures should be square. 4096x4096 is as high-res as people tend to go. 2048 is more common. 1024 is still not uncommon for a lot of things. 512x512 is everything in Half-Life 2. Below is not usually a thing you want.

     

    I'm just self-taught :)

  9. Posted

    BSP* is easier to work with than meshes if you haven't done modeling before, although

     (I'm on at them all the time to work on that). It's less efficient (in terms of performance) than staticmeshes, though in practice you're unlikely to get anywhere near being bottlenecked by it (except on mobile). So if using BSP is more comfortable for you, just do it, even if some butt says it's dumb. If you are concerned about the performance of your BSP but are okay with how it actually looks, there is a "convert to static mesh" button when you select a bunch of brushes which works well.

     

    The conventional wisdom is that Modular Mesh Style Level Design™ is the way to make levels in Unreal (though I have issues with that conceptually that I am gonna do a video about) and that's the approach most folks will tell you to take. That is, the LEGO-like thing - you make a bunch of meshes and place them next to each other, say, a 100x100 wall mesh that tiles nicely with itself, cloned a bunch of times to build a hallway. You'd have another different version of the mesh for "wall with doorway" or "wall with window" or whatever. Depending on what you're doing and how good you are at modelling, having to do that can be annoying, especially when you're just starting out. 

     

    Basically, I suggest using BSP until you find that it isn't good enough for what you want to do, then model stuff. If you're making a game for mobile, always convert BSP to mesh.


    Hope this hasn't been too overwhelming!

     

    Hourences is legit, absolutely knows his stuff. 

     

    3DSM costs so much because Autodesk are fucks.

     

    Also, UDK is the free version of UE3, not UE4 :P

     

     

    *not technically BSP but everyone calls it that

  11. Posted

    Yeah, it's only a good idea for certain types of things and in certain scenarios. An important thing to realise about it especially for mobile is that each face is a draw call.

    The engine could benefit enormously from a decent geo system, but I've probably already harped on that in here before.

  15. Posted

    Directional lights are occluded by geometry. The thing that was happening is a directional light represents basically a sun for most purposes - lighting from infinitely far away in a particular direction (specified by rotation). That's why its location is irrelevant. But yeah, I mean, it sounds like a tutorial for unreal geared toward people who have already dealt with the same concept in other engines, which is not super helpful to beginners.

    I also don't at all think it's intuitive to rename the Geometry tab to BSP. I do call it BSP but it isn't technically BSP so I don't know why you would switch back to that terminology tbh.

    In case helpful:

    -Directional light = the sun, light from far enough away that shadows are always parallel, location therefore irrelevant

    -point light = omni directional light

    -spotlight = light shining in one direction in a cone shape

  16. Posted

    Hmmmm. Interesting. How were you expecting the directional light to behave versus how it did behave? As a matter of fact, it doesn't matter where the directional light is physically positioned - only its rotation matters - so you could have left it in the floor. But it sounds like that wasn't intuitive.

  25. Posted

    today I've been doing a procedural ladder blueprint. you just give it the meshes you want to use (or use mine), a little bit of info, and pull a bunch of sliders around to change basically everything about the ladder. my mate donhonk is doing some art and we're gonna see if the ue4 marketplace wants it

     




     

    this is a particularly useful thing for level designers because the alternatives are:

    -bullshit some ladders with brushes

    -make bespoke ladder meshes for the particular spot where you need one

    -have a few ladder meshes of various lengths and throw them together end-to-end hoping for the best (actually works better than you'd think when you're able to put part of the bottom section underground)

     

    anyway, this is better