Level Design in UE4 is slow and tedious.

Community Community & Industry Discussion
123

And on top of it all unreal uses CSG for brushes.

As many wrote , brushes are for prototyping or making some low poly flat floors. However now for flat floors that do not ruin mesh budget for whole map better are blueprints with instanced static mesh. No more fiddling with materials, each tile of instanced floor can have different tint.

There are some good FBX export plugins, just use google search.
Oh and there was some app that made seamless importing and exporting from 3d (or maya) to unreal and back. so you could work in that 3d app and see live updates in unreal editor.

124

What was the app called for the seamless pipeline from to UE4?

125

Rockstar doesn’t exactly create multiplayer maps os scenes in deep need of gameplay balance.

I mean, you run and shoot at people.

I can see them only testing and using BSPs or blocks to beta test missions only.

But as soon as you’re trying to design something focused on a specific gameplay flow and you want to fine tune stuff you have to say goodbye to such a flow.

You can’t really start a platformer with exact sprites and or 3d models. What if you want your character to acquire an exact speed to jump over that fire? Imagine making a Mario 64 level starting with a 3d models. Could you make a multiplayer level directly with 3d models? What if you start testing the gameplay, the level flow and you notice that building X, room Y is unbalanced and offers wrong line of sights, no cover for team A or you want to add some (let’s add another floor so to increase verticality in specific section of the map).

Serious level design is about trying and trying, applying ideas fast and being ready to change them constantly and even throw them away if they don’t work.

Can you ask art department (or yourself, if you do everything alone) “hey, you know that beautiful villa you made? well, it doesn’t work, make me a 1 storey hangar and put a couple of airplanes as we need something with two lateral lanes where players fight and something to block the middle” and then “hey wait, a boeing is too big, give me a cessna”, and so on.

I just cannot imagine any serious level design starting with 3d models (that’s also a reason why the autodesk engine interested me as you cna change stuff on the fly all of the time seamlessly between and UE).

As soon as you start testing and testing your level design over and over to offer the most balanced and funny experience the amount of work on your art department to change the stuff they’ve done starts being just too much.

It’s way easier to say to your art department “listen, you have a copy of the map with bsps, it’s been tested over and over and it works well, now concept artists and modelers find a way to make something pleasant to see out of these geometries”.

126

You should check out the map editor included with Dota 2, you can create surprisingly detailed things really quick in it, plus you can export to FBX. If you know your way around it, you can do some crazy stuff. I managed to create a small cafe style building in like 5 minutes and a fairly detailed canal environment in like an hour.

127

The PROBLEM is that if you have too many BSP brushes in your map it SLOWS THE ENGINE ALL DOWN to a snails crawl. The Tool to create your landscapes with seems to be ok to use for the outdoor areas. But its better to import in static meshes. It pays also to drop your lighting and textures down to a lower resolution AND NOT have everything set on EPIC unless you are doing small sized environments. .

But I’m doing a small city with a few regions around it like desert and wilderness so the quality level of the lighting
and textures resolution of my map has to drop down to allow me to build the regions without the editor becoming
unusable if I had everything on epic…

Not all of us know how to use or model very well in these other 3d modeling programs to try to build our levels because we used to building the geometry of the level up with brushes like you did with Red Editor, Quake and other older Engines building the geometry from inside the engine.

128

, I did make a outdoor map with those BSP tools both static BSP meshes and geometry BSP , I inserted a huge Static white Mesh BSP Cube for the ocean and chucked the water shader on it and it lagged the map so bad when moving the camera around it took several minutes for the editor to respond so I got rid of the BSP static cube, and used the flat Plane Shape instead to put the ocean shader on it I had no trouble anymore with all heavy lag…

So that tells me that the BSP Static Tools that you have in the editor are not optimized for proper engine use
and starts lagging the map. Those tools are only suitable for building up small scale levels with, or small outdoor
levels with little detail, They’re no good to use for doing large outdoor stuff…

That’s why when you import in static meshes in from other 3d modeling programs to assemble your level up with, unreal is capable of putting down a mile or more down of those landscapes and static meshes in the map. it has to be imported in. The engine was optimized to only really work with other 3d modeling programs to build the map with.

Although I don’t know what the size LIMIT is for the default Landscape Engine Tools but at the moment I managed
to put in a small city, a desert region, and now starting to do the Flurries Nesting Grounds next to that. So it seems to be ok for doing an outdoor level with some regions as long as you drop your specs down from EPIC to Minimum in your textures and lighting settings otherwise the editor is gonna gonna take a long time to respond with the camera if you
bump everything all up to the level. But I’ve only got 16 gigs of ram.

129

Because its fun, and there are things that require the old way of doing it. PBR doesnt work for everything, in fact, it mostly sucks and is a waste of resources.