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!