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Unreal Engine Game Development Cookbook
Unreal Engine Game Development Cookbook

Unreal Engine Game Development Cookbook: Over 40 recipes to accelerate the process of learning game design and solving development problems using Unreal Engine

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Unreal Engine Game Development Cookbook

Chapter 2. Level Design – Building Out Levels or Greyboxing

In this chapter, we'll cover the following recipes:

  • Building a room
  • Building out a level
  • Applying materials to geometry brushes
  • Converting brushes to static meshes or volumes

Introduction

In the game industry, there are two main roles in level creation: environment artist and level designer.

An environment artist is a person who builds the assets that go into the environment. They use tools such as 3ds Max or Maya to create the 3D model and then use other tools such as Photoshop or Gimp to create textures, including diffuse and normal maps.

A level designer is responsible for taking the assets that an environment artist creates and assembling them in an environment for players to enjoy. He/she designs the gameplay elements, creates the scripted events, and tests the gameplay. Typically, a level designer creates environments through a combination of scripting techniques and uses some tools that may still be in development. In our case, that tool is Unreal Engine 4.

Note

One thing that is important to note is that most companies have their own definitions for different roles. In some companies, a level designer may need to create assets, and an environment artist...

Building a room

Now that we have an understanding of the interface of UE4, let's start with creating one of the most basic things, a room.

Getting ready

Before we start working within the Unreal Editor, we will need to have a project to work with:

  1. Open the Unreal Editor by clicking on the Launch button from the Unreal Engine Launcher.
  2. Start a new project from the Unreal Project Browser window by selecting the New Project tab. Select Third Person and make sure that With Starter Content is selected. Give the project a Name (for this chapter, I am using Blueprints_Chapter2). Once you are done, click on Create Project.
    Getting ready

How to do it…

Now that we have our project set up, let's get started with building the room.

  1. With the editor open, we will first create a new level for us to work in. To do that, go to the top-left corner of the screen and go to File | New Level… or press Ctrl + N.
  2. From here, the New Level window pops up. Click on the Empty Level template, and you will find an...

Building out a level

When I started using Unreal Engine, it took me a long time in order to create any type of new level. I would keep placing static meshes to hide areas of geometry that I missed or added in blocking volumes to make it actually possible to go through certain places. One of the key reasons I had problems with this, is because I didn't know how to create a good workflow and the key to mapping things very easily by using brushes in the Geometry Editing mode.

Getting ready

Minimize the Perspective viewport by clicking on the button in the top-right corner of the viewport (circled in the following image):

Getting ready

You will then see four windows and notice a grid of sorts in all the other viewports.

Getting ready

Tip

You can click on the same button in the top-right corner of any of the four windows to maximize it.

When in a different viewport, controls work a bit differently. Most importantly, right-clicking and dragging will pan the camera. For more information on the differences, refer to https...

Applying materials to geometry brushes

Once you have your level blocked out, you'll probably want it to look better than just some greyboxes. We can very simply add some life to our world by adding materials to the surfaces of our brushes. Let's do this now.

Getting ready

This recipe assumes that you have a project open with the Sample Assets included as well as a room created with Geometry Brushes (BSP). If you do not have that yet, feel free to follow the instructions for the Building a room recipe.

How to do it…

Now that we have our room created, let's add some materials to it:

  1. Inside the Content Browser tab, go to the StarterContent/Materials folder. Here, you'll see a number of materials that we can apply to the surfaces in our world. Select the M_Wood_Floor_Walnut_Polished object and drag it onto the floor of our room.
    How to do it…

    You can already see how its making the room look a lot nicer. This works well for a one-time event, and technically, we can do the same thing for...

Converting brushes to static meshes or volumes

As level designers, we will often greybox our levels to playtest and make sure that a level is fun and works correctly. Once we get to a point where the level is not going to change very much, we give our environment artists a model with the environment and then they can go in and make everything pretty with complex meshes or create pieces for us to build it out modularly. The first thing we will be doing in this recipe is creating the mesh that we can give to our artists. The second thing we will be learning is how to convert brushes into volumes. As you may be aware, the high-poly meshes that our environment artists would create could be very computationally expensive to check against collision with other objects at runtime. A trick that we will often use is to convert the brushes into a blocking volume that will still have the collision as we've been using and then filling the world with meshes to look the best it can.

In addition, you...

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Description

Unreal Engine is powerful tool with rich functionalities to create games. It equips you with the skills to easily build mobile and desktop games from scratch without worrying about which platform they will run on. You can focus on the individual complexities of game development such as animation and rendering. This book takes you on a journey to jumpstart your game design efforts. You will learn various aspects of the Unreal engine commonly encountered with practical examples of how it can be used, with numerous references for further study. You will start by getting acquainted with Unreal Engine 4 and building out levels for your game. This will be followed by recipes to help you create environments, place meshes, and implement your characters. You will then learn to work with lights, camera, and shadows to include special effects in your game. Moving on, you’ll learn Blueprint scripting and C++ programming to enable you to achieve trigger effects and add simple functionalities. By the end of the book, you will see how to create a healthbar and main menu, and then get your game ready to be deployed and published.

Who is this book for?

This book is for those who are relatively experienced with Unreal Engine 4 and have knowledge of its fundamentals. Working knowledge of C++ is required.
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Length: 326 pages
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Language : English
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Table of Contents

12 Chapters
1. Getting Acquainted with the UE4 Interface Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
2. Level Design – Building Out Levels or Greyboxing Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
3. Creating Quality Interior Environments Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
4. Building the Great Outdoors – Exterior Environments Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
5. Lights, Camera, Action – Cinematics Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
6. Lighting and Shadows Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
7. Art Pipeline – Working with Materials Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
8. Blueprint Scripting – Level Effects Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
9. C++ Programming – Gameplay Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
10. User Interface Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
11. Publishing and Deployment Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Index Chevron down icon Chevron up icon

Customer reviews

Rating distribution
Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Empty star icon 4
(2 Ratings)
5 star 50%
4 star 0%
3 star 50%
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1 star 0%
Ivan Carmosino Apr 09, 2016
Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon 5
Chiaro e completo inglese per nulla difficile e decisamente scorrevole. Inoltre c'è la possibilità di avere sul sito dell'editore anche le figure a colori. Spettacolo
Amazon Verified review Amazon
ViceVersa May 01, 2016
Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Empty star icon Empty star icon 3
like half of what he goes over in this book is very common knowledge. Unless you are absolutely brand new to unreal, and for some reason dont know how to use youtube, i wouldnt recommend it.
Amazon Verified review Amazon
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