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Question for you guys when building interiors for homes are the floors usually static meshes or just BSP? I'm looking for best practices from going from the blocking out phase to a more realized state.

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That's awesome. Saves you dealing with a lot of issues to use solid colours and low detail geo like that.

 

Thanks. Flat-shaded solid colors is my default style for whatever I'm working on, makes things look a bit more interesting with very little effort.

 

Question for you guys when building interiors for homes are the floors usually static meshes or just BSP? I'm looking for best practices from going from the blocking out phase to a more realized state.

 

I always convert BSPs to static meshes. For reasons that are beyond me BSPs cause quite a performance hit, and you can't control things like whether they cast shadows or have collision.

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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.

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I'm not sure if this is a bug, or just something that's not supported, but in my project, none of my blueprint interface events are triggering from within widget blueprints.


Is this a known thing, or am I making a mistake somewhere?


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Hmm, not sure, I haven't used widget stuff much... might have a look later.

 

In procedural ladder news, they're approved and sent off and should be popping up on the marketplace soon! Hoorayyyy

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Anyone know where I can get some decent beginner tutorials for Maya 2014? Youtube isn't really giving me any great results. 

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Okay, I went back to the well and gave UDK another go. I managed to get something resembling a level put together, it was fun.

 

Anyway, I've decided to download 3DS Max because I can get it for three years as a student trial version. So I guess my question is this: what's the best way to go about building a level? Should I be roughing things out with BSP, exporting them over to 3DSM, converting to meshes and then re-importing into UDK? Or do I want to build LEGO-like bits in 3DSM and then bring them in as static meshes for UDK to work with? I was watching some tutorials from a lad named Hourences (he was recommended to me by one of Gearbox's technical artists), and it seems like he does the latter.

 

Also, why the hell does 3DSM cost so damn much?

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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

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Is there a way to create normal maps within UE4, or will I need to be creating those in something like Mudbox and importing them into the engine?

 

Also, is there an easy way to add vertices to basic brushes? I'm trying to build sort of a generic spaceship corridor by building a block and then using a subtractive brush to hollow it out, but it results in me having to click and delete about 50 vertices so that it's a semicircular prism (i don't want the full cylinder).

 

And as far as using my own textures, is there a good reference point to start on something like that? I'm adept at Photoshop and would like to create some bespoke content ( :eyebrow:).

 

Thanks for holding my hand through this crazy stuff, it's a lot to immerse myself in all at once. Did you go to school for this stuff or just start learning on your own and keep at it? 

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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 :)

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After watching your video I'm very sad UE4 doesn't allow you to edit BSP the way hammer does, that would make blocking out maps so much quicker and more fun too.

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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

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So UE4 is now free. Cool.

 

Ahh you beat me to it. Yeah this is big news! $20 was never a huge barrier to entry to begin with, but the perceived difference between cheap and free is a large one.

 

Edit: Just realised I've used the phrase "big news" for two posts in a row. I'm so predictable.

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For people like myself the difference between free and $20 is huge.

 

I'm super keen to try this out.

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They gave me $30 worth of marketplace credit as a refund, I bought some rocks. Putting UT in the same launcher as the engine will however kill my productivity, given the choice between working and shooting someone in the face with the flak cannon I will always choose the flak cannon.

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They gave me $30 worth of marketplace credit as a refund, I bought some rocks. Putting UT in the same launcher as the engine will however kill my productivity, given the choice between working and shooting someone in the face with the flak cannon I will always choose the flak cannon.

 

I'm pretty sure it was $30 store credit + a pro-rated refund for the last month.

 

In other news, looks like they just added a friends list to the Unreal launcher? If anyone wants to add me on there, I'm zerofiftyone.

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Any ideas on how to do in-game photography? Render textures reset on restart, so that's not an option.

 

And I'm honaj on the friends thing.

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Unfortunately the latter, I basically want to save a single frame as a texture.

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Hrmm. If you wanted to save it as a file, and then load that file as a texture then maybe this plugin could help:

https://forums.unrealengine.com/showthread.php?3851-(39)-Rama-s-Extra-Blueprint-Nodes-for-You-as-a-Plugin-No-C-Required!&p=226090&viewfull=1#post226090

 

 

I haven't attempted it myself, but I guess it's available as a thing to try.

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