Has anyone had any experience using spline actors for trenches? Would it work? I'm thinking they would possibly allow much faster and smoother trench creation for maps.
Level Design Spline Trenches?
- Thread starter Dziga Vertov
- Start date
No, but a great idea to try!
Without "covering" the gaps I find it nearly impossible to line them up correctly. Noticed even on a couple official maps the other day, tiny gaps between meshes.
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Yeah, I know, can't tell you how many damn hours I've wasted countless times trying to do extensive trenches. If splines are workable, it would be a godsend, but something tells me if the devs didn't use them, they probably had a reason that is beyond a humble fool like myself's understanding. It may be that they work, but just are not easy to set up cover for, which would suck.
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I haven't found it to be a big problem, you just need to make sure the mesh and and the terrain are lined up along the UDK's gridlines... In fact If I've already sketched out the trench system let say a few hundred meters worth of trenches, I can get it done in less than 45 minutes...
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Well, even if it weren't a whole lot faster, it would still have the potential for far more natural, organic, and unique looking trenches. A lot of trenches in the game are basicly parallel lines, and they all have the same curves and bends. This could help break up the monotony possibly.
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Yeah, I wouldn't mind that at all. The problem is that you can only rotate meshes by 5 degrees.....without showing through the adjacent ones.
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yep but only if you make a mistake on placing a mesh. that happens often enough, cause you need to care the Grid All the time if you place an Trench Mesh, cause they are forced to stay on an higher grid, to place some easily correctly.
what i did, i tooked every mesh piece, placed the cover nodes and some other assets and then i made an prefab out of it. result creating a trench system took me only 1 day for complete stalag 13. instead of a few months like climbup.
but true that a spline, give it a way more "realistic" look. but yeah a loots of more holes aswell
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Yes, me too, I think that it may be that spline actors only work for very small segments of things. If this is the case, it may be possible to cut the trench mesh down to a very small section and try elongating that. I will try this using blender. (edit) yes, as I suspected the crashes seem to be caused by the base trench object being to complex for the splines to handle, so when I cut it down to just a small bit there isnt the crash. Unfortunately I now dont think splines have collision for whatever reason, so that makes them next to useless for trenches sadly.
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