BSP Modeling Tips?

Hi, I have been playing with grayboxing with BSP modeling in Unreal Engine 4 for the past month. Is there any good tips in modeling with BSP? One of the biggest issues I have with BSP modeling is that I very often find myself seeing a lot of overlapping BSP geometry. Is there a way to easily snap bsp to other bsp? I know that if you hit the ‘end’ key it will snap to the ground, what about to other bsp or other directions? I have checked with Unreal Tournament prototypes maps and many people seem to do a very good job making a very nice BSP map with no overlapping geometry at all.

I dont know if there is an easier way, but when you are in the “4 window view” + when you use grid snapping (for very small movement, you can also turn it off), you can easily place bsp brushes without overlapping:)

Hmm, still very time consuming. I also tried surface snapping which seems to do nothing…
I pretty much go back and forth between views as I’m placing bsp brushes around. I wish there was a edge snapping tool similar to 3ds /Maya edge vertex snapping between multiple geometry/selections.

You can go into ‘Geometry Mode’ and edit BSP by vertex. This allows you to avoid overlapping geometry BUT if you watch the videos you’ll see that that’s not really a big deal. Even the Epic videos have overlapping geometry all through them. You should also keep in mind that, if you really want an efficient game, you shouldn’t use too much BSP. Open any of the Epic projects, go to the viewport settings and turn off ‘static meshes’ in the viewport. You’;; be left with just the BSP and you’ll see that there’s almost none. You can, however, convert your BSP to a ‘static mesh’ and achieve pretty much the same result.

Alright, I won’t worry too much about overlapping geometry. I only use BSP geometry to create my level graybox and soon after export the bsp as a static mesh to my favorite 3d software and model on top of it. Once I’m done modeling the static meshes, I replace all the BSP geometry with the new static meshes.