Hi all!
I’m sure something like this has been requested before, but it would be fantastic if there was some sort of BSP displacement like there is in Source. There is obviously the Landscape toolset already, however something like this would be great for making things like islands quickly and easily. Landscape is only one-sided and is a 2D plane, cannot be dug into for caves, etc. (without removing parts of the landscape and adding in separate meshes), and modeling terrain is a huge pain. Honestly, at this point, a full overhaul of the BSP geometry system would be useful. The way that the Source engine handled BSP made the level design workflow so much quicker and more efficient. While Unreal is obviously a very different engine, I think this could help some of us out there too where aren’t necessarily aiming for hyper-realistic, detailed meshes and could settle for something a little more blocky and made from BSP geometry.
Another request for BSP is to be able to “draw” it, like you can do in Source as well. In Source, you are able to go into an orthographic view, click and drag on the grid, and press a key to create geometry in that shape/size. That way you can just click and drag to create floors, walls, etc. in an instant.
The next request is a feature to apply a material to an entire BSP brush, rather than just one face at a time. It’s extremely irritating to have to drag the material onto each and every face of the geometry (especially when you’re working with stairs, spheres, cylinders, or anything else with a lot of faces).
The last request is another thing taken from Source (I really love that engine if you can’t tell :P) with a few ideas of my own, and it’s a separate material browser for meshes/BSP. Basically, you could tag any material with a material type (IE: floor, wall, landscape, entity, etc.) and use that material type to search for it in the Material Browser. In the details panel for meshes and geometry, there would be a button (next to the area for choosing a material) that would open the Material Browser window. It would be a simple window with a search bar and thumbnails for all of your materials in the project. The thumbnails would just be the albedo map for the material, since having a 3D mesh with the material applied as a thumbnail distorts it, and for me at least, makes it harder to use. While it would show every material in the material browser, you could search by material type and it would only show the materials tagged with that type (IE: if you searched “floor,” any materials that you tagged with “floor” would show up – that way you could quickly and easily find any floor materials you may want to use). You could also search by material name/prefix, IE M_Underground or M_Underground_Dirt_001, and anything with that name or prefix would show up. Then, you could simply click on the material and it would apply it to the mesh/geometry you had selected.
Again, I realize that Unreal is a lot different from Source, and Source is only able to use BSP the way it does because it doesn’t aim for realism like Unreal, and mostly is only able to produce very blocky stuff, but changes like these would make the workflow a thousand times easier, better, and quicker, and the lack of this functionality is making me consider switching back from UE4 to Source or Source 2 when it’s released.
EDIT: Forgot to mention this, but another request would be to remove the need to convert BSP altogether, if at all possible, and just fix the lighting and performance with it so that it can be used directly.
EDIT 2: Yet another thing I left out: it would also be great if we could change the pivot point on geometry in-editor so we don’t have to export it to a 3rd party modeling program for that.
EDIT 3: Material displacement support for BSP geometry.