Level Design Sean's SDK Video Guides.

[Seanchaoz]

Hey mappers and modders united!

I've put together a small handful of various mapping related guides but never really advertised them much on the forum. I'm considering making more in the new year, and so I thought I'd make a topic for organization's sake and ease of access.

Now keep in mind that, as most of us on here I believe, I am just an amateur who picked up mapping as a past time hobby. I've been working in the SDK for only a year (at this current writing) and have primarily learned by doing and closely studying the work of others. That said, I feel that I am a fast learner with a good enough eye for detail that I can offer these guides with at least some confidence that they can be of help to others.

I will add to and update this thread whenever I've put together a new guide, and will answer any questions people might have in relation to them. I am also always open to feedback, suggestions and corrections from anyone to help improve or fix any possible mistakes/misinformation these guides might suffer.



[GUIDE] #1 - Combining Floor Meshes
* Combining multiple single floor meshes into a single new floor
* Generating UV's and Splattermaps for seamless lighting and blood splatter
* Creating custom collision models for the new floors

[GUIDE] #2 - Tips on Creating Interesting Room Geometry
* Dressing your walls, ceiling and floor up to look visually interesting
* How to avoid having walls that feel flat and sterile to look at
* Using performance friendly meshes to add world geometry

[GUIDE] #3 - How to take Interesting Screenshots
* Tips and tricks on how to take spectacular screenshots for your map
* Using in-game console commands

[GUIDE] #4 - Shadows and Lightmap Resolutions
* Talking about the differences between Dynamic and Static shadows
* How to create sharp and crisp static shadows by Overriding Lightmap Resolutions

[GUIDE] #5 - How to do Blood Splatter (splattermap configuration)
* Overriding splattermap resolutions on meshes
* Combining meshes to produce seamless blood splatter
* Tips on how to hide segmented blood splatters without combining meshes
* Combining lessons to configure splatters on an actual fully detailed room

[GUIDE] #6 - Building a custom Destructible Actor
* Assembling an intermediately advanced KFDestructible Actor from scratch
* Basic instructions on how to add Sub objects, Damage mods and spawn Actors on destruction
* Not originally intended to be a guide, but for lack of better serves the purpose

[GUIDE] #7 - Destructible Lights
* Building a basic multi-stage destructible light from scratch
[video=youtube;zwBYyejeK-Y]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zwBYyejeK-Y[/video]


[GUIDE] #8 - Creating Volumes
* Using the Brush to create basic and semi-advanced volumes
* Wrapping buildings in Indoor Lighting Volumes
* Blocking off areas with Blocking Volumes and Pawn Blocking Volumes
* Making a ramp-shaped Collision volume for movement aid
* Putting down Trigger volumes and hooking them up to events in Kismet

[GUIDE] #9 - Basic Lighting
* Using and setting up Skylights and Dominant Directional Light
* Creating Lighting Volumes for correct Indoor and Outdoor lighting
* Pointlights vs. Spotlights and their (dis)advantages
* Lighting performance and optimization
* Shadows: Dynamic vs. Static vs. No shadows
* Lightmap Resolutions, when, why and how

[GUIDE] #10 - Basic Movement Optimization
* Smoothening out corners and crevices (and why you should care)
* Preventing players from getting stuck on environmental detail
* Wrapping world geometry in manually shaped Blocking Volumes
* Collision modes: Block All vs. Block Weapons
[video=youtube_share;vb-enruIrR4]https://youtu.be/vb-enruIrR4[/video]

 

[manolito]

Very useful and necessary for those who start, thanks for sharing with others.

 

[[SM]TOPSGT]

Outstanding. Super job on the combine mesh vid. I know that I'll have to re watch a couple of times. This is a good place for TW to have a tool that does the brush wrap like they do with the bounding box feature. Very helpful. TY.

 

[oldschool]

This is a good place for TW to have a tool that does the brush wrap like they do with the bounding box feature

Sounds like greek to me....?!

 

[manolito]

Hello, in the process of combining meshes I noticed that when doing it with the second method that is counted in the video several brush are created, some of blue that form the piece and one of yellow color that has the total form of the piece , The blues I have to delete to not have problems in the map but the yellow ones that do not cause any problem I do not know if I have to delete them too, you could tell me if they have to be deleted.

regards

Thank you

 

[Seanchaoz]

Thanks guys! Glad to hear they have been of some use to you

I'll be doing a few more vids in the near future. Current plans are:

- Another design guide video on using trims to add subtle details to your map and hiding transitions between material changes. Something it seems that many mappers don't understand the importance of, or are not aware of.
- An expanded video guide on blood splatters, as this is another area I see many mappers having issues with.
- A follow-up video on combined meshes, talking a bit more about it and also including walls and ceilings.
- A guide on lights, shadows and lightmaps.
- A general performance optimization video (I am no expert on this field, but I do know a handful of good optimization tricks).

Hello, in the process of combining meshes I noticed that when doing it with the second method that is counted in the video several brush are created, some of blue that form the piece and one of yellow color that has the total form of the piece , The blues I have to delete to not have problems in the map but the yellow ones that do not cause any problem I do not know if I have to delete them too, you could tell me if they have to be deleted.

regards

Thank you

That sounds very odd, I don't think I have seen that happen before, not sure what the problem is. I have had combined meshes bugging out as well, sometimes not allowing collision and other times causing strange collision models to happen. In such cases you may have to just redo the whole thing, sadly. Make sure you select a good mesh as the first actor when combining meshes. If you are doing floors with lots of different meshes (like paper debris, books, blankets etc.) always start by selecting one of your modular floor meshes, as the properties of the combined mesh is taken from the first actor selected.

Also be careful not to include non-meshes in your selection, like emitters, destructible actors, lights, pathnodes and such as it can cause your combined mesh to bug. This can sometimes happen if using the multi-select method.

 

[MixMakMax]

Your video on the combination of meshes was useful to me since I totally had forgotten about the mesh combining tool but never figured out how to make the splatter maps seamless but your video showed me how, thanks for that! However there is problem when it comes to lighting, when using baked shadows on combined meshes, the results are not what I expect and I have to decided either having splatter map seams but good shadow results or seamless splatter maps but no pre-computed shadows ticked in the settings.

I'm sure if bad shadow results is due to having complex meshes combined, as in my case I needed a floor mesh to have combined paper debris, fallen doors and a window blind. Not sure if there is some fix or something I should do, but so far I couldn't figure out how to avoid bad shadow results. I wish I could share a screenshot at the moment but I'm on my laptop atm.

 

[Seanchaoz]

Your video on the combination of meshes was useful to me since I totally had forgotten about the mesh combining tool but never figured out how to make the splatter maps seamless but your video showed me how, thanks for that! However there is problem when it comes to lighting, when using baked shadows on combined meshes, the results are not what I expect and I have to decided either having splatter map seams but good shadow results or seamless splatter maps but no pre-computed shadows ticked in the settings.

I'm sure if bad shadow results is due to having complex meshes combined, as in my case I needed a floor mesh to have combined paper debris, fallen doors and a window blind. Not sure if there is some fix or something I should do, but so far I couldn't figure out how to avoid bad shadow results. I wish I could share a screenshot at the moment but I'm on my laptop atm.

I'll be doing a lighting/shadow guide soon.

I'm guessing your baked shadows on the mesh is blurry or barely visible? All you need to do is just override the light map resolution:

The higher you set it, the sharper and nicer the baked shadows will be, but will also increase file size and memory allocation so you should only do it on meshes where players will actually notice the shadows. It's important that you only use numbers in a factor of 2. So 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, 256, 512, 1024 and so on. There's generally no reason to go higher than 1024 as the difference is barely noticeable.

I typically override to 512 on my meshes where I need good shadows. If I need extra crisp shadows I'll go 1024.

 

[Seanchaoz]

Hey peeps, I've added a new little guide on how to better configure shadows using Dynamic and Static, and overriding lightmap resolutions. Video is in the original post.

 

[manolito]

Thanks for your new video, I see that I have more work still pending.

regards

 

[manolito]

Hello with reference to the video of the lights, the meshes for static shadows with quality are put on from 512, the rest of meshes of the map also? Or you are just to see the shadows well

regards

 

[MixMakMax]

Hello with reference to the video of the lights, the meshes for static shadows with quality are put on from 512, the rest of meshes of the map also? Or you are just to see the shadows well

regards

When you increase the shadow resolution of a single mesh, the custom resolution is set ONLY to that specific mesh. You would have to set your custom shadow resolution 1 mesh at a time or you can select multiple static meshes and then bump up the resolution easier. Although it's nice to have sharp shadows you must take in mind that your map file size will increase, so don't go crazy, I mean it's your map and all but just remind yourself about that. Also have in mind that not all meshes need large shadow resolutions, just analyze your map and think what mesh should or shouldn't need a shadow resolution increase or decrease, everything is about balance.

 

[Seanchaoz]

Yep, thanks MixMakMax. Basically what you said.

Each mesh needs settings tweaked. Most of your floors, walls and ceilings should be combined into large meshes though, and on these you only need to override once. You don't have to override it on each mesh comprising the combined one.

And again, as Mix says, setting a high res on all meshes is really not needed. The auto generated lightmap is for the most part fine in areas where you don't need to have sharp static shadows. If your map has for example a dynamic dominant light casting dynamic shadows, you may not even need to tweak lightmaps as they will be hidden beneath the dynamic shadows when players are close, and once they move out of the dynamic range, the static shadows will often be far enough away that they don't need a high resolution due to view distance.

You just have to experiment and see what fits your map the best.

 

[manolito]

Thanks to both for the clarifications, I already have almost the whole map with meshes combined, so the changes of resolution I make on the meshes combined.

I try to find the balance I do, but my team is not very good and every time I compile it takes a lot so I take patience, right now I'm trying to get some static shadows in an outside area as the dynamics disappearing When you go away they make a very strange effect, the difference with respect to the video is that the point of light is the dominant, if I remove the dynamic shadows I do not know what effects will have on the rest of the map like an outside skyLight I have.

regards

 

[Seanchaoz]

If you set the "Whole Scene Dynamic Shadow Radius" on your dominant light to 0, it will only cast static shadows. This is a nice little trick (and a performance optimization I believe) to emulate a skylight that casts shadows.

A normal skylight cannot cast shadows because it has no directional point of origin. Skylights create ambient illumination that lights up everything everywhere, from all directions and therefor there is no source from which to cast shadows. So in essence, a DominantDirectionalLight with a Dynamic Shadow Radius of 0 emulates a skylight with shadow casting abilities.

Try setting it to 0 and take a look at your map. Then tweak your static shadows to your liking, and increase the dynamic radius again when you are happy with the baked ones.

 

[JackSheepson]

+1 Great videos!

 

[Venom2000]

These are amazing videos Sean! I hope you continue to expand with more for us beginners!

 

[Seanchaoz]

Hey peeps, added a 5th video focusing specifically on how to do splattermaps and get good blood splatter on your maps.

 

[Seanchaoz]

Aaaaaand another unplanned guide added to the original post. Was really a "spur of the moment" thing while working on a personal project I decided to record the building of a custom KFDestructible actor. For lack of better, it can be called a guide I think

 

[Seanchaoz]

Guide #7 added, showing how to make a destructible light from scratch.

Guide #8 will be added next, which will be on general Volumes usage and creation.