A few Details (Part 1)

This first part will be a little short, sorry, I was quite busy this week.

Anyway, today i'm going to add more detail with BSP brushes. I'm going to add things that I will probably go over with static meshes later.

For reference, here's the concept art again:

First we're going to make a trim around the edge of the roof. To do this, we're going to go into geometry mode. Once again, to do this, click on the 3D cube shape in the top left hand corner of the toolbar along the right-hand side of the screen.

Once you have the geometry tools menu open, click on the "Pen" checkbox in the modifiers area. Once you've done this, go to the properties section, and change the extrude depth to 32. Now you can start making your own custom brush.

 Now I'm going to start trimming my roof. Instead of just adding a block, that goes all the way around the roof, I want to add some more depth to it. I'm going to make a subtract brush that goes along the inside of the trim. To use Pen mode, select an area in an orthographic view (I've chosen top-down, because of the shape i'm making) now hit spacebar. You'll notice a red vertex shows up. by hitting spacebar, you've just created this vertex. If you move your mouse to another area, and hit spacebar again, you'll create another vertex. you can keep creating vertexes this way to make your shape. Just remember to always return to your first vertex to finish the shape. There is always a dotted line going between your first vertex, and the one you most recently created.

At this point I will start going around the edge of my roof with the pen tool, leaving 32 units worth of space between the edge of my brush and the edge of the roof.

 I will keep going until I've gone all the way around the roof, and finished my shape.

Once I've finished my shape, I will re-position it, so that the top surface is at the same height as the top
surface of the roof.

 Now i'll hit Ctrl-S to make a subtract brush, and voila! I have a roof with trim!

 You might notice that the square pattern material on the roof now looks weird and out of alignment.
An interesting trick, if this bothers you, is to right click on the surface, go to "select surfaces" select all surfaces (it's at the top) and hit F-5.

 You'll now get what is called the material properties window. Once you're here, go to allignment, select planar, and hit apply. All your materials should now line up properly!

Here's the result. Looks much better right?

The result, already much better looking!

Now i'm going to make that block that has the fan in it on the bottom right hand corner of the roof. This is just another add brush so just look at the picture for the dimensions.

Now I've noticed something. The edge trim doesn't go all the way to the bottom part of the roof! What can I do? No problem. I'll just click on the subtract brush and go into geometry mode again.

Now i'm going to select an edge, like in the image.

Now that I've selected that edge, i'm going to click on the "Split" option. This will split the edge in half, giving me more vertices  to work with.

Now i'm going to do it again, on the lower half of the edge.

Now i will rearrange the vertices like in the image below, and then click the optimize button on the geometry tools menu.

You might notice that nothing has happened in 3D view. this is because we haven't rebuilt the geometry of the map yet. Whenever you make changes to a BSP brush you have to rebuild the geometry.

Some more additive BSP boxes...

A useful tip: If you find you can't properly line up the brush you want, just right-click on one of the corners, it will snap that corner to the grid, and can give you a better chance to line up your brush.

Finally, I'll build the lighting. Now we can see that the roof already looks much more interesting. Next week, it will look even better.

First Step: Basic Shapes

Alright, It's Saturday, and here's your first post. In this post, I will use some concept art I found on the internets (http://digital-art-gallery.com/picture/10131) to use as reference to help build my map. Here's the pic:

So let's start.

First I loaded up UDK, and picked one of the premade lighting maps, just so I don't have to do the skybox and global light myself, cause i'm lazy.

Then, because these boxes are not exactly helpful, I deleted them.

Alright, then I made my first shape, which is the right near side of the roof of the building in the art. Like so:

The dimensions of the box are 2048 by 1536 by 1024. I then added the BSP by pressing ctrl-A. (For those of you who don't know, this is the shortcut for adding your BSP brushes with your builder brush.)

Next I made the shape of the front left section of the roof:

The dimensions on this shape are 1280, by 1280, by 1024.

Then I slowly built up the shapes one by one. You should be able to see the orientation and size of the brushes in the images.

At this point I used a subtract brush. A subtract brush, for those of you who don't know, cuts out a chunk of a pre-existing BSP brush. It can be hotkeyed with ctrl-S.

Here's an interesting trick for beginners! If you click on your scroll-wheel, you can get a little measuring tape, that measures distance on the orthographic (side, side, top) views. I used this to measure out the size of my next shape.

I put in two of the shapes, the second was lower down, and farther back.

Here's another subtract brush.

And now a massive floor.

I actually made a second little box like this one, but it was on the left side of the box, a little longer and a little lower.

Now I edited the yellow box that came around the premade lighting map, so that it fit exactly around the edges of the floor I had put down. For those of you who don't know how to edit vertexes of a shape, just open up geometry mode, its the 3D cube shape on the to of the toolbar on the left-hand side of your screen. Just click on the two vertexes in the orthographic view, and drag them over.

Now the yellow box surrounds my entire map. This yellow box is called a "lightmass importance volume" It basically tells the swarm engine (UDK's lighting builder) that this is the area that has to get the highest lighting detail, the rest can be done more quickly. Use it to highlight your playable level, but not the background scenery, or you'll be wasting lighting information.

Now it's time to do the first build of our map. click on the "build all" button, the arrow is pointing at it. This tells UDK to build the geometry, lighting and AI pathing all at once. AI pathing is something I'll discuss later.

That's it for today, don't forget to save!

Hello!

          Hello! I'm Emraldis, a mapper with UDK I am also the team leader for RROT and a mapper for AM3. Once every week, probably on the weekend sometime, I will upload an Image or two of a map that I'll be working on from scratch. In each post I'll describe what I did, and, if necessary how I did it. Feel free to follow along if you're new to UDK, or use these posts for inspiration or help on maps you're working on. If you have any Ideas, or questions, just leave them in the comments section of the relevant post, or the latest post, if your question isn't relevant to anything I've been working on so far. I hope to delve into Kismet and matinee, just to give the newcomers tutorials and step-by-step examples on how to use kismet in some of the basic ways.

                    Hope everyone enjoys this!

                                                                                                         Emraldis.