Posted by: Bill
Date posted: Feb 22 2003
User Rating: N/A | Number of views: 8795
Number of comments: 0 |
Description: Create your first room |
Unreal ED 3 – Your first room
This tutorial covers:
• The first room
• Build
• Lighting and light properties
• Static Meshes
Note : When you start Unreal ED for the first time you may notice that the brightness is overly high, almost blinding in some cases, this is because the gamma setting in Unreal ED is linked to the your gamma setting in UT2003. So in order to fix the problem you can either set your gamma lower within the game or go into your UT2003 system folder and delete the file ut2003.ini. Doing so will restore you the default gamma settings which should be more bearable
Start off by firing up Unreal ED, you should see a screen like this:
In this tutorial we will be focusing on getting a simple room made with a light source, a player start and some simple static meshes.
First off you need to create a build brush for your room. A build brush is like a place holder for the brush you are creating, it allows you to resize and edit the brush before you have even subtracted it from the game world. To create a simple cube build brush right click on the cube icon on the menu to the left.
This menu will appear
Leave the height setting on 256, change the width to 512 and the Breadth to 512 also, this will create a room big enough for the player to run and jump around in comfortably, so go ahead and click build, you will see a red block appear in the viewpoints. Once you’ve done this, click close.
Your screen should now look something like this. Now, as I mentioned before the builder brush is like a placeholder for the brush itself, to subtract the brush from the game world we need to hit the subtract button (or CTRL + S when the build block is selected)
Now the brush will appear in the 3D viewpoint, it is textured in the default texture (ugly green bubbles) so we need to change it, if we don’t Unreal ED will spit errors at you when you Build the level (compile). So, we need to bring up the texture browser and find some suitable textures, to do this, hit the texture browser button.
The textures that load in the texture browser by default are pretty dull, so we are going to load up a different texture package, click File > Open and then select the Humanoid Architecture package and click open.
Texturing your level is very simple, minimise the texture browser and then left click anywhere in the 3d Viewpoint and move around using the mouse. holding down the LMB (left mouse button) and moving the mouse forward and backwards moves you (unsurprisingly) forwards and backwards while moving the mouse side to side rotates your view left and right. Holding down the RMB (right mouse button) and moving the mouse in any direction will rotate your view while remaining stationary. Holding down both LMB and RMB and moving the mouse will allow you move up/down and left/right. Anyway, back to texturing your map, left click on any of the walls of the room to select it, then right click and select - Select Surfaces >Adjacent Walls. This will select all the walls in the room. Bring back up the texture browser and select the walls section of the package.
Click on the texture, wal01HA to texture the walls of your room with that texture, keeping the texture window open left click on the floor in your 3d viewpoint, then select the floors section of the package and the texture flr02HA, next select the ceiling of the room in the same way, select the ceilings section and the texture cel03H.
Your room is now completely textured, now we will align and fit the textures to the surfaces. Close the texture browser and right click on one of the surfaces, now press Shift + B to select all of the surfaces. Right click on any of the surfaces and click surface properties.
Go to the Alignment tab, select Face and click the Align button. Your textures should now be aligned, like this:
The next two steps in our first room are to insert some light with a source and a player start, so save your work and change your textures if you want before we carry on.
Lighting the level
Lighting in Unreal ED is very easy, to place a light right click in any of the viewpoints where you want the light roughly to go, then click Add light here, then to position your light select it by left clicking on it, and then, holding down CTRL, move you mouse in one of the viewpoints to position the light.
But that’s not it; an ambient light in a room like ours would be slightly unrealistic so we are going to give the light a source.
Open up the Static Mesh Browser by clicking on the icon of a green arch:
This brings up a browser window which works in a similar way to the texture browser window. We are going to insert a static mesh of a light bulb that we can put on our walls with a light next to it, as to create the effect of the light coming from the light bulb.
The light we want is in a different package that is not loaded by default so go to File > Open and select the AlleriaHardware package. Go into the lights section of the package and select the Light01AB mesh, minimise the browser and right click inside the room in one of the 2d viewpoints, notice that Add Static Mesh: ‘AlleriaHardware.Lights.Light01AB’ has appeared in the menu, click it to insert the static mesh into the room. Position the mesh in the same way as you did the light, (Left click to select and then hold CTRL and move the mouse) Position the mesh like this:
Next we need to reposition the light we placed earlier so that it is level with the mesh and just in front of it, like this.
The penultimate stage in this tutorial is to duplicate the light and the light source mesh, rotate it and put a copy on the opposite side of the room. To do this select both the light and the mesh by left clicking on one, then holding CTRL and left clicking on the other, press CTRL + C to copy the two and then CRTL + V to paste them, to rotate them by 180 degrees hold down CTRL and RMB and move the mouse to rotate. Now position the copy of the light and mesh on the opposite wall from the originals.
The last step in making the level is to add a player start to do this right click anywhere inside the room in one of the 2d views and click Add Player Start Here.
Just one more thing before you can play your map, we have to compile it, and unlike in games like Half-life, compiling maps in UT2003 is very fast, all you have to do is click the Build All button, which looks like this.
The map is now compiled, Unreal Ed might give you an error concerning the player start but this is a bug in the program that the latest UT2003 patch should get rid of. Don’t worry though, you can still play your map, it makes no difference, to play your map click on the joystick button and let UT fire up.
In the next tutorial we’ll cover editing light properties and adding more rooms to your map. Any questions feel free to e-mail me at monkeyboy@dob14787.freeserve.co.uk.
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