Community Tutorial: How to use Square Builder

A tool for fast level design + building + prototyping.

https://dev.epicgames.com/community/learning/tutorials/Oayl/unreal-engine-how-to-use-square-builder

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Thank you! Where can I download Square Builder?

I’m trying to get it accepted on the marketplace. It seemed odd to put this up first but they needed documentation.

Help, I don’t know how to use it, the characters like the house, door and windows didn’t behave as I thought, they just generate holes in the floor, I expected it to change the wall meshes to the window meshes?

→ How do I change the material of the walls, floor and ceiling individually?

There are several other variables that the video and the documentation don’t show what they’re for.

image

How and where are they applied?

Ah, only black and white squares are used right now. Icons like stairs :ladder: don’t do anything unfortunately. Mainly because a square represents a whole room and we wouldn’t know which direction they face. They’re just there for planning like…

:black_large_square::brown_square::black_large_square::black_large_square::evergreen_tree:
:black_large_square::brown_square::brown_square::black_large_square::black_large_square:
:black_large_square::brown_square::brown_square::brown_square::black_large_square:
:evergreen_tree::black_large_square::skull_and_crossbones::brown_square::brown_square:
:evergreen_tree::evergreen_tree::black_large_square::black_large_square::black_large_square:

…and possible future use. I should make that more clear.
I might have made them represent a blank square, so we can place our own stairway easier. I haven’t found a practical way to automate stairs. Some things are just easier to do manually.

Windows and doorways are a WallVariant.

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How do I change the material of the walls, floor and ceiling individually?

And could you explain to me how I apply the decorations?

Walls, floors, and ceilings can have different materials from each other by changing their details

But the individual floor material can’t be different from other floors, if that’s what you mean, because they are an instanced mesh. If they need to be, I would make them empty and add it manually. Or use a 2nd SquareBuilder if it’s a whole area. It’s good for making the bones of an area, and then details are often more practical to do manually.

But if Material Override is set, it will override everything.

Decorations: just specify the Floor.Square (ex. 1.4, 1.5) and pick a mesh or actor. (I seem to be using an outdated version that’s missing options :smile: ) More details on decorations here.

Floor.Square you can find like this

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Amazing, that’s what I needed, it’s going to save me a lot of time, that’s life hack :slight_smile:

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Do you have any idea where this error is coming from? Everything seems to have generated fine, I tested this by loading the level via Load Level Streaming in Standalone mode

This may also be the solution to a small bug where if the “B_Sauquare_Build” blueprint is cached on memory and if opens a new map, it causing the editor to stuck at 100% while loading the map in the editor.

It appears to be invoked after a For Loop in an integer’s Switch in the “Build” function.

I believe it’s an unexpected wall variant type (integer). A switch is expecting 0-3. …and -1 also seems fine. Anything else throws a warning. It shouldn’t cause any problem. Just an empty wall.

image

I’ve never tried level streaming so I couldn’t say about that. Maybe a delay before constructing would help out level streaming? Something like: (but this adds a delay while editing as well)

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It didn’t work, this only happens if we have many actors like this in the world with buildings around 16x16 in size. Anyway the project is working, but this error rooting a thousand times in a row bothered me. If you find a way could you let me know which nodes to change?

Definitely a lot of warnings are annoying.
Well the one I mentioned is the only integer Switch, and having a WallVariant value that isn’t on the switch is the only reason I can see for getting that warning. :thinking: So double check them. And check if they are actually the same warning.

The way I’d prevent it entirely would probably be to have it check if the integer is a valid value (between 0 and 3) before the switch. But that really shouldn’t be necessary since we don’t want to use wrong values.

If it still gives a warning you could check if it still does without level streaming? Can’t imagine that making any difference though.

An alternative would be to convert them to meshes: Actor → Merge

This problem started last night, I tried to open it in an incognito tab but it didn’t work, what happened?


Hmm, good question. What led up to it? What browser?
Incognito shouldn’t make a difference and seems fine in Brave, Edge, and Opera GX.

The only thing that comes to mind is if it was saved into a notepad that isn’t using correct character encoding (UTF-8) for emoji characters and then gets copied and pasted into the website. something like that could maybe result in unknown characters.

I tested it on Edge and Chrome (both updated), I copied the characters directly from the UNREAL editor to edit this. I notice that when this happens the white or black square in the menu deselects itself and I need to select the white square again and paint the area marked as “Undefined”, but this is happening all the time and it gets in the way a bit.

Update: I’m also unable to edit anymore, copy and paste from the editor to the website and this happens

That’s odd. I’m not sure about the deslecting. :thinking:

Part of it could be UE isn’t handling fancy emojis well and pasting to UE and back is returning unknown characters… I only use black + white in UE.