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Level Design Making buildings

nymets1104

Grizzled Veteran
Dec 18, 2012
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USA
Is it a No No to use the builder brush for creating buildings? Is it required that I learn to use 3D modeling program to create buildings and export them as meshes or will the brush buildings work?? I have read that Meshes are less taxing on GPUs than the brush shapes but would love to hear others opinions before i devote hours of development time to learning something completely foreign to me..:D
 
You don't need modelling skills to use it, I don't know how to model and can still use it. Find a reference photo of a house you like and try and match up the windows and doors make it look symmetric, use maybe a house from Saipan as a reference if you'd like that size. If you actually want to put the time in to learning modelling do that though

A couple of bsp houses aren't going to do anything to your map performance wise
 
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Problem with converting BSP to mesh is you will need to add collision (blocking volumes). Problem with BSP buildings is that when ever you use the subtract brush it may lead to invisble collision shelves not visible in the editor, and if you add trim (window and door frames) there are extra polys, albeit few.

Plus side of meshes you can vertex paint them. Plus side of BSP it has its own collision.

Making a building inside of the editor, build to the grid (vertices on the grid points). After layering up your walls with addative brushes and applying textures, copy-n-paste the entire structure elsewhere and do whatever rotation you want to the group. Vertex editing will allow you to make destroyed shapes.

Alternatively, make a builder brush that encloses your new building and deintersect, move the resulting red brush away and add. It will preserve your textures and make it into a single brush (this makes the brush a single draw call for performance reasons, each texture/material used adds a draw call). Remember to keep it simple. Floors and ceilings should be seperate brushes to prevent light bleed in corners, and wall vertices should terminate at those intersection lines because polys are lit per vertex.

Much simpler to make buildings if you have a modelling program, and you can integrate collision volumes as part of the import. Blender is a good free 3d program to play with.

I made lots of meshes for Yakovlevo_CA, finally figured it out with the "Control Tower", which was the last to be added.

panzers.jpg


I know, TMI....
 
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I'll throw my hat in the ring with my experience. Right after I began messing with the editor I felt the need to figure out how to make my own static meshes for buildings, etc... and spent a ton of time learning how to use 3DS Max. I probably spent as much time in 3DS Max as I did the editor, which means hundreds (thousands?) of hours. In all that time spent I have never completed a model that was good enough to use in a map. What I do have are a few dozen half-baked buildings, fences, etc... that all have UV problems or overlapping faces that I can't seem to fix. (That being said, if someone would like to straighten out or otherwise fix all the crap I've build over the last few years, you're welcome to them.)

I'd just go with BSP's. They're MUCH easier to work with and you don't need to spend time learning a new program that will take time away from the map you'd rather be working on.
 
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Problem with converting BSP to mesh is you will need to add collision (blocking volumes). Problem with BSP buildings is that when ever you use the subtract brush it may lead to invisble collision shelves not visible in the editor, and if you add trim (window and door frames) there are extra polys, albeit few.

Plus side of meshes you can vertex paint them. Plus side of BSP it has its own collision.

Making a building inside of the editor, build to the grid (vertices on the grid points). After layering up your walls with addative brushes and applying textures, copy-n-paste the entire structure elsewhere and do whatever rotation you want to the group. Vertex editing will allow you to make destroyed shapes.

Alternatively, make a builder brush that encloses your new building and deintersect, move the resulting red brush away and add. It will preserve your textures and make it into a single brush (this makes the brush a single draw call for performance reasons, each texture/material used adds a draw call). Remember to keep it simple. Floors and ceilings should be seperate brushes to prevent light bleed in corners, and wall vertices should terminate at those intersection lines because polys are lit per vertex.

Much simpler to make buildings if you have a modelling program, and you can integrate collision volumes as part of the import. Blender is a good free 3d program to play with.

I made lots of meshes for Yakovlevo_CA, finally figured it out with the "Control Tower", which was the last to be added.

panzers.jpg


I know, TMI....

WOW! I learned more from this post than from 300 hours in the SDK...thanks!

Additionally as Catalavos stated, I am overwhelmed by trying to learn 3DS as just making a map takes up more time than I have to give in the first place. Going to start with brushes for now but since this will be an urban setting there will be quite a few buildings. Does anyone know how the french buildings were accomplished in Darkest Hour? I realize this was a different engine, but just curious ...

Thanks for all of the input
 
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What Catalavos wrote :eek: I found it unnecessary to learn blender from scratch for my level of mapping..
So for simple building shapes i just used bsp brushes then transform to static mesh - all can be done entirely in udk. Also bsp wont be rendered if its not in line of sight ingame. So in the end for most simple way u can just create mesh for outside walls and rest, floors etc by bsp.. And well remember for making that simple mesh structures like the walls with windows u can only use bsp - the ones with blue edges (sorry I didnt open udk for long time and i lost terminology), u cant make it with the ones with orange edges (extracting ?) lol
 
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OK thanks for everyone's input. The workflow I am going to start with consists of:

1. Create Buildings (both decorative and enterable) in the UDK with BSP Brush
2. Use Twrecks's directions to convert the buildings to a single brush.
3. Convert the Brushes to meshes
4. For Decorative buildings I will then add collision in the UDK's static Mesh Editor
5. For Enterable buildings, I will then export the meshes as .obj files
6. Open the .obj files in 3DS Max and add custom collision and possible further details.
7. Export the meshes as .fbx back to UDK for use in the game.

At this point I plan on creating 5 or 6 different Enterable Buildings and probably even more decorative ones that cant be entered. If this causes problems or issues, I will let you know but for the time being I feel much more comfortable working with BSP's in the UDK than I do making buildings from scratch in 3DS Max.
 
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