I’ve never used UDK or any other game development engine but I found the tutorials to be very well done, making the subject matter very approachable.
In the sample level build tutorial Zac chooses change the X, Y, Z values of brushes rather than rotate them. Zac starts to explain why he’d rather change the values than rotate the actor. Presumably this is to keep their global and local coordinates in sync? However, static meshes get rotated so it appears that rotation is inevitable in some cases.
I was curious how the Workflow tutorial was done? I’m assuming that large sections of the level were selected and copy/pasted. How do you select and duplicate large amounts of your level?
Because the price is very affordable and the editor is relatively easy to dive into I suspect you’re going to see a lot of newbies like me. It might not hurt to have a super simple Level Design 101 tutorial that includes a glossary… What’s a brush, a mesh, an actor, a pawn. When is appropriate to use these. Maybe some simple background on what’s a Texture, a Normal, UV. When is it advantageous to use a brush and when do you change that brush into a static mesh (and what’s the best way to do that)?
Something to keep in mind if/when you do a tutorial on Terrain… It took me a while to realize that I had to drag the mesh onto a very small drop area (eventually I got super frustrated and googled the issue and found that others have had the same issue) but then it took me even longer to realize I had to hold down CTRL while clicking in order to paint terrain onto my map. It felt good to finally figure it out but a fair amount of time was wasted.
A lot of these things should be explained in the documentation if I’m not mistaken. You should utilize both the Youtube channel and the official documentation, both are great assets and will continue to expand.
To answer your question about selecting, you hold the ctrl key in order to select multiple portions of your level. Duplication is ctrl + w.
Heres the documentation on viewport controls if you have any more questions regarding those - Link
Here’s the index of the official documentation - Link
Nope, you’re not mistaken. I found a very good section on actors here and texturing here. But I still think a glossary wouldn’t hurt (being the complete noob that I am).
w/r/t selecting, here’s the tutorial I was thinking of: Intro to Level Design | Live Training | Unreal Engine - YouTube
At that time stamp you can see all four phases of the level from a high altitude. I would imagine that CTRL-RMB clicking nearly every item in the that tutorial to then copy it to the right must have been very tedious. I was hoping there might be a way to zoom out from above, then lasso select a section of the level, and then copy that to the right.
In any orthographic viewport you can marque select (dragging while holding ctrl+alt) all your actors, and that will select them all. I believe this also has been added to the perspective viewport in 4.1, but if you’re using 4.0 then orthographic viewports are the way to go, you may also want to try using scene outliner for tasks of this sort.
Thanks ! It looks really good so far. (One typo spotted in Animation: “…It can even refeer…”)
What would be fantastic would be if at the start of each chapter, as each term is used, there’s a link to the glossary for that term (or, perhaps, just hovering over the term could bring up a note popup that has the glossary entry for that term).
