Level Design in UE4 is slow and tedious.

Nearly all game devs. use static meshes :stuck_out_tongue:

You can do it in there, because it’s even better when you import the buildings as meshes (instead of using BSP). For the terrain you should convert it to a heightmap, because the UE4 landscape tool will create lod’s (better performance). But in my opinion you should do everything in the UE4, because otherwise you have a pretty inconvenient workflow :wink:

I won’t have many static meshes (I think), since most stuff are just manipulated cubes.

That’s really nice. I’m curious to see imported to UE4. What’s the conversion from Hammer to UE4 Units?

There was someone arguing about having to work hard to do things, well it is true in a way but i don’t like that mindset.
From my experience in IT, i’m deeply convinced you can achieve better result working lazily with methods than hard with bad/outdated methods…and in the case of 3D the workflow seems to be a huge part of the “method”

Importing static meshes seems to be the best way you can make levels/buildings on UE4 right now, but that does not means it could not change in the near future for “something easier” (for exemple improving BSPs). Well, i understand people already mastering making nice static meshes with rather complicated software want to keep their edge or just prefer things useful to them

I only know very well AutoCAD and some Sketchup and i intend to make some archviz with UE4. I surely won’t learn something as complicated and time consuming as 3DSMax to design my buildings and interiors and i agree the UE4 editor is not fast.
So for for now i decided to use Sketchup for simple meshes like walls etc…as it is way faster and for more complicated meshes, it will be imported “from the net” or from “packs”.

Btw thanks for the “tip” about Hammer 2 editor, i’ll check it.

Without meaning to offend anyone, I think very few people have worked in an actual production environment. The ability to keep your level elements separate from your level is really irreplaceable, and you can’t do that with BSPs (Unless you convert them to static meshes, but then what’s the point?).

I can’t understand (well I can, but you know what I mean :slight_smile: ) the whole argument.
Obviously there are lot of people who use some form of white boxing in the level design workflow (I would bet it’s almost everybody to a degree). There are folks who do simpler white boxing and folks who would like to do a bit more complex white boxing. Then there is certain amount of people who wouldn’t mind being able to do simpler models (static meshes) right inside UE. Even though I have 10+ years of experience in 3dsmax, with good modeling tools in UE I wouldn’t mind staying in UE for simpler/stylized games. Of course with good modeling tools I don’t mean alternative to maya/, but rather something along the lines of DesignerTool in CryEngine.

Even Epic admitted they are aware of the demand for BSP replacement, so all in all it looks to me like Geometry Editor 2.0 should be a win-win situation for huge amount of UE users, maybe most of them (I guess those who don’t mind current BSP wouldn’t mind something similar just better). I know there are quite a few areas that seem to need more attention at the moment, but still I’m a bit surprised GE2.0 is staying in the backlog in Trello for so long.

How many people play CSGO?, how many people would rather play that then sit there and look at Crysis with 4k textures on and 5fps, again your missing the point, not everything needs to be complex with 5000 polygons just to be good and interesting. Not everyone that uses Unreal Engine is a production team, I would bank more on most of it’s users being hobbyists. No ones asking to take your MVC type production pattern away.

Soulroll- you can take a static mesh box, use a WorldCoordinate3Way and that will get 90% of what you can do in a bsp editor.

.unrealengine/latest/INT/Engine/Rendering/Materials/Functions/Reference/Texturing/index.html#worldcoordinate3way

Clone the box around, non-uniform scale, do whatever you want. You won’t have to worry about vis blocking because there is none, no caulk, no hint brushes, go crazy. You won’t have vert editing but you could always make a new simple shape like a triangle or cylinder. Everything will texture the same way it does in Quake/HL and act essentially the same as brushes.

I wouldn’t build anything final way but if you want to prototype levels it will work.

I’m confused as to why you’d even want to use UE4 for reason when like you pointed out, things like CSGO exist, you can make levels for that or TF2 that actually function before you get anything meaningful going on in UE4.

After messing around with Hammer 2014 as suggested, the tools are just better for what I want to do then export as fbx, problem solved.

It seems 1 Hammer unit = 1 cm in UE4.

Everything import fine into UE4, but smoothing groups/hard/soft edges are currently not exported with the Source Engine 2 Hammer editor FBX. It’s obviously a bug - I’ve already file a bug report with them.

If you’re just going to take it into Modo anyway, then there’s no point in starting modeling in a game engine, the modeling tools are better in Modo.

And that’s part of the point, why spend the time to improve the BSP tools in UE4 when most people don’t use them (and wouldn’t use them) and programs like Modo/3ds /Maya/Blender have better tools

@

I’m going to quote myself from another thread:

Just one example of why the new hammer is faster for level design, if you create a cube then create another one right on top of it, it stacked the new cube on top. doesn’t happen automatically in Modo. Also texturing/UV in new hammer is faster because it’s streamline for speed. A good analogy is, you could sculpt in Modo(a general purpose DCC app) but it’s not as fast or streamline as using Zbrush. :stuck_out_tongue:

There is a point and your missing that point it’s called “slow and tedious”.

Cheers you’ve been the biggest help in the entire thread.

That’s a very very specific situation where it has a that’s more helpful. In general modeling it’s only one more click to snap a newly created cube to another cube. But most people aren’t going to be working with cubes that much, since things are going to be more complex than cubes.

To use your analogy–you can kind of sculpt in 3ds , but not really, and it would be a waste of time for Autodesk to try and add features to 3ds to match Mudbox or Zbrush when those other software already exist and do it better, even though it’d be more convenient to have it in your main 3D application.

No problem, Don’t forget to select all your mesh and “Freeze Transform” before exporting, or else things will be all over the place :wink:

@ - that’s just one example, there are many more things that make level design faster in Hammer then Modo. Geometry Editor 2 is going to happen, I’m gonna do some GUI mock up! :smiley:

FBX does support the export of soothing groups. It’s a check box in the exporter and if not then it’s a missing not implemented by the application. FBX is not just another importer/exporter but is a format native to a program called Motion Builder that Autodesk made an API available under free licensing.

How may formats comes with their own SDK?

://download.autodesk/us/fbx/20102/FBX_SDK_Help/

Makes the idea of an in app editor rather moot as anyone could make one as a plug in or through FBX or better still through the “send to” server.

More or less FBX is the first true global format where the ideal of export/import do not apply and the first true DCC wrapper required for cloud based computing. Since FBX import is available in UE4 then the need for in app editing is obsolete.

Just saying. :smiley:

Managed to get the basic wall done, without using UV unpacking and blah blah 10 days later etc.

://iforce.co.nz/i/ufbi1cyu.yob.jpg

Only problem is when I import the fbx into Unreal Engine the texture comes in upside down see below, i’m missing something somewhere.

://iforce.co.nz/i/ae4vnd33.gq0.jpg

@Soulroll,

Not sure why that’s happening but if your using UE 4.6.1 there is a rotate option when you import. Did you select the wall then “Freeze Transform” before exporting?Also,did you go through any 3D modelling app or was it just straight from Hammer to UE4? If you can post the map file I’ll take a look at it.

There was a Freeze Transform but now I can’t seem to find it for the life of me, I would upload the map but it’s using a bought texture from gametextures, ill keep messing around till I find out whats going wrong.

update think its something to do with the tga texture itself, ill try with a different texture.

I think yours is doing the same, the F texture is coming in upside down.

update A quick fix is just to add TexCoord -1 -1 to the imported material blueprint