- Pardon my grammar mistakes. I'm not English so it's not my main language, hope you still understand what I mean despite of it. :) (I did a spelling check though)
- When I talk about "look above room x, or look below room y, I always talk about the TOP viewport. So if I say look above the blablabla room, look in the top view to find it and not in any other view. Only if I mention something else.
- I placed zoneinfo actors in the map that light the map for now. You'll need to delete them (or turn their light off) once you begin adding your own lighting. They are just so everything gets illuminated when I test the map out.
- Let's keep this round to BSP. Don't add static meshes yet (or not too much) We'll do that later on in a later assignment. Right now I like you to learn a bit more about BSP, just so you know what you can do with it. And maybe if you know what to do with BSP you get a better idea of how you want to make you're static meshes in a 3d app and how you will implement that in your map. Also don't use lighting at this time, we will do that later.
- For your convenience I grouped the map. So if you don't know what room is where in this tutorial look at the name the assignment is in in this document and look in the group browser in UED to find out which one it is. Also when working in one room it might be useful to turn off the others so your 2d view won't be cluttered up with the rest of the map. This increase your workflow quite a bit. If you add new stuff and rebuild it might disappear, just open the group browser and select the newly created group "none". If you can group them back to the right group.
Quick tutorial: Select the actors you want to add to a group and press the create new group button, give up a name and you'll have a new group with the selected actors. To remove actors: select the actors you want to remove from a group in the map and highlight the group they have to be removed from, then press remove selected from group. The same with add selected to group, just the other way around. Highlight a group and press select all in group to select all actors inside a group. Marquee selecting can be done by going into camera movement mode. (icon on side)
- If you want to do more than the assignments ask of you, feel free. But please first make the assignments and then go crazy how much you like. Unless the assignment says you can do what you want off course.
- True, no-one will stop you by copy and pasting my pieces of geometry, but who do you fool with that ? Me or yourself ? So just don't copy and paste, you'll learn nothing with it. :)
- With all assignments keep in the back of your head that you will add some static meshes later on. So don't clutter all up with BSP. The only exceptions might be the first two rooms, they are already full of BSP and I like you to continue with that. Try to think about this especially with the low square room and round room. Those are almost completely empty and with a little forward thinking you can really plan out the room and make a nice mix of some BSP and static meshes. Although as a "real" mapper you would prefer to have as much static meshes as possible we will not keep strict to that guideline and we will feel free to ignore it. As far as the top right room is concerned, its already very cluttered up with BSP so it might be wise to completely ignore adding static meshes there. (except maybe some pipe works and small static meshes)
- If you have any questions about the assignments or about the editor use the 3dbuzz forums for your questions and also use the irc channel. (server : irc.3dbuzz.com, channel : #ued) Try to answer each other questions first before asking me, I think you'll learn more if you help each other out. Unless it's a question about things you don't understand about the assignments or if I made mistakes with them, then turn them directly to me. You can always mail me via : marvinraymakers@hotmail.com. I'll hang out on IRC when I can and I'll keep an eye out on the forums. I live in the Netherlands which is GMT +1 and I'm online at the evenings.
The picture to the left holds your ticket to vertex edit wonder land. Great tool you're going to love. Select the brush you wish to edit (or the builder brush) and click on a vertex to select the vertex that you click and the one that is underneath it. You can also marquee select vertexes by holding the alt & control keys and then dragging the mouse. Move selected vertexes by holding control and dragging the mouse in the direction you want them to go. If you want to edit one vertex select two of them, move them a little away and from another viewport select one of the two. Edit it and pull back the other vertex to the original position. When vertexes move too fast to get them in the right position, lower the mouse speed in ued. You an do that by pressing the "Change camera speed" icon on the sidebar. Practice a bit to get to know how it works. It's not hard but you've got to be careful with it. Let me tell something you will want to avoid and things you'll want to do. If you just start vertex editing, ALWAYS edit two vertexes at a time that are next to each other. Why ? I'll explain in a minute. Never ever pull back two vertexes on the opposite site or pull back one and push forward the one that is next to it. You will also find that if you are trying to create a complex object that consist of multiple additives and is heavily vertex edited (or even mildly) will generate holes all over your object.
First let's explain a bit about what I have done and what you want to do or avoid. If you look at the long room I've made some geometry in the ceiling, by default fake backdrop view is off so you might not see what they are for. select the 3d view and press the "k" key. This will turn on fake backdrop view and you'll see the skybox through fake backdrops. If you hang under the ceiling in that room and look up now you see I have created some nice window type structure. I used two different approaches, maybe you'll see it yourself. Take a minute to look around the two different sections and turn fake backdrop on and off to inspect them. As you see I used fake backdrop on one side (left side in picture) directly on the substraction which you would be able to touch if you could fly in game. That's why I placed some beams to make sure a player could not reach the fake backdrop and be blocked by it. Imagine how that would look in game, being blocked by nothing. That's no good. With the second structure I created a glass dome, and personly i like this method better. I substracted a large piece that has the fake backdrop and then added the dome structure. That approach is a little different. Cause know you could actually walk on the top of the building. (which I prevented cause I don't want that to be accessible) I could have created the dome shape pretty much the same way as the other structure, but now it has volume. But the real reason i like that method better is because of what i explain below.
In the above picture i like the right method better, why ? I can add things to the substraction on top, so that when a player looks up he can actually see some stuff outside the play area. That will make the room look much more interesting and it will fake the impression that something is outside the map. You could for example place some trees on the roof or some type of machinery. Imagine what would look better, look outside and only see the sky or look outside and actually see that the play area is not the only thing that's there. That there's life outside the map so to speak. Also note that I placed a blocking volume (the gray-ish square) under the dome, this is because for the glass of the dome I used sheets and sheets don't have collision. So I have to use blocking volumes to fake the collision with the dome. If I would have done it right I would have matched the collision around the dome itself, but for now this is enough. Just to show you that you want to use the collision volume, else you would be able to fly through the glass. 
One more important thing to not do with textures that you can see through. (glass, grating, etc) You can cause some anomalies with it, and you wouldn't be the first to make that mistake. To show what I mean look above the long room, I created another room there. You'll notice three solid blocks with that dirty texture on it. There are also three windows sticking inside the blocks. The first one (left) is wrong, the second and third are ok. Why ? Take a close look in the 3d view at the first one. You'll see that you can look through the window and inside the block. Very very wrong. This will look like crap in game so do not do that. Instead use the second or third method. The second window is floating above the block. Look very closely in the 2d view at it, you'll notice that it's floating one unit above the block. This prevents you from looking inside the block so this is good. And the one unit floating will not be seen in game, it's too close to being noticed. The third example is a sheet that's sticking inside the block. This will cause no problems simply because the sheet has no volume, so you won't be able to look inside the block. Remember to use a blocking volume for the collision of the sheet window though. And remember that a sheet will look bad if you can look from the side of it.
- Remember the geometry you had to remind, it won't show properly no matter how many rebuilds. That's because of the order in which it was added and substracted. The editor sees a additive, substractive and a sheet (the ones I added) and then a substraction (the one you made), so it substracts the sheet and additive. To change it select the additive, substractive and sheet that where already there. Right click and choose order -> To last (in this case it also works if you select your substractive and choose order -> to first). This will move them to the end of the stack. Resulting in the editor seeing your substraction and then the additive, substraction and sheet. Thus after a rebuild you'll have a thing inside the tunnel that is going to be a grate. So select the sheet and put the texture humanoidarchitecture.grates.grt01HA_AlphaTwoSided on it. And you have a nice grate on it that we'll do something with in a later assignment.