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Level Design Some noob questions.

Dementei

Member
Mar 21, 2015
8
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Hello I'm a bit of a noob coming from Source SDK, thought it was time to move onto static meshes and terrain other than laying out BSP on a grid :p

I currently put together a quick 3 part attack/defend territory map, which somehow works.. when I look at the kismet of the original maps it's much more complex than mine. I just need to add a delay before shifting spawns and adding the boundaries that stop the teams from getting too far into each other's spawns.

Anyhow I was wondering why there is no foliage button in my editor:

nxYlo5F.jpg

Is the editor outdated for this game or something? There was always like advanced terrain options I think last time I was in an Unreal 3 editor as well.

If there is someone out there that can sorta be my mentor that I can ask questions to on Steam whenever that'd be cool. I have a lot of questions, especially since coming from Source, things are rather different but I learn fast. I have experience in 3DS Max and Maya too so I'm fairly familiar with moving everything around with pivots...I hate pivots. And I'm so used to pressing QWER for select, translate, scale, rotate tools which doesn't work in this editor.
 
Thanks guys, I'll test out the foliage real soon. Working on a layout for right now, I made the heightmap in L3DT really cool program, I think what I'm going for might be a bit too much for me to handle all at once since I'm just starting out.

http://i.imgur.com/hYLGidg.jpg

This will need a vast amount of foliage and trees to work out properly and of course some houses. I need to study Tripwire's maps more to really get into detail, to give it a "full" look.

Basically the Allies assault from the southern beach and capture points along the way with the final being on the highest point of the map, but there's a lot of paths for Allies to reach the top so it might work out idk :p
 
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Alright I understand foliage completely now, tonight I threw together a new island map, that other one was way too ambitious and ugly. I think I might actually get somewhere with this new one, take a look: http://i.imgur.com/qE249YA.jpg

I stole the sky and lighting from Betio and most of the props, I guess it's going to be similar to D-Day Normandy style at first then it will be a hilly land battle leading over a bridge to the other small island. Sounds reasonably simple.

If I have any more questions I'll post back here, I'll take any tips if you guys got any.
 
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Okay new question, how the heck do I fix these dark shadows?

G6gti5j.jpg


In Source I could adjust the Ambient lighting to set shadow color and brightness, what's the best way to do this in Unreal? There's Global Illumination but that's already on, not sure if it helps. Also how taxing is it to have dynamic shadows on most of the meshes? Do they fade out?
 
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This video helped me out after someone else suggested it to me to paint terrain with grass and such:

Starts after 40 minutes about grass and such:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R_expuF5SyA

I suggested this to Veld, You should check out his other videos too. The shadows can be adjusted through the dominate lights properties.

I'd recommend ignoring all the foliage and crap for now (meaning anything visual), what you really want is to get setup in the kismet, all the volumes, roles, before you even start adding meshes, and terrain materials.
 
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Add a SkyLight.


Open the content browser.
Click the "Actor Classes" tab.
Click the + in front of "Light"
Click once on "SkyLight" so it is highlighted
Right Click some where in a preview pane (where you see your map)
In the newly appearing menu, click "Add SkyLight Here"


There it be.


Click on the Skylight actor if it isn't already highlighted, press F4
...(or Right Click actor and select top "SkyLight Properties")
Adjust Advanced Properties to suit.


I bump up Display>Draw Scale really big 10.00 to 100.000 on main light actors. Only effects size of actor on screen, nothing else, makes it easy to find later.


Rebuild Lighting (light bulb icon button).
 
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Thanks twrecks I definitely needed that I didn't know there were two master light entities so it looks way better now. It's safe to say I can make a whole territory map just fine, the kismet work is no problem. I am going to try to collab with a popular server see if I get something going with them, it'll be good practice. Here's a small sample I put together the past few nights, http://i.imgur.com/msifLDE.jpg it definitely made good for practice. I did come across one real problem though, my terrain layers became too complex after I added a 5th material layer which sucks because I have two sands, two grasses, but no room for a rocky material. I may have to resort to decals for that.
 
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