I’m new to UE, currently learning on v4.7, but I have used other graphic programs, and frankly it’s surprising that there is no built in measurement tool. I’ve read about a measurement tool for use only in orthographic view, but I’ve not been able to get that to work. It’s really too bad and inconvenient that you can’t lay out the equivalent of temporary dimensions in your project. I’m going top guess people have complained about this before now.
When you looking at a grid to the horizon, how do you do a rough layout, just start placing assets and wing it?
Thanks for answering. I read that you have to be in orthographic view to get the measuring tool to work? So I have a practice project in orthographic view (Alt J), I use hold the MMB and drag it from one object to another, and nothing appears. I used this article as reference:
Supposed to be a white line with a number?
What is a modular kit? I’m thinking about planning a scene. It’s just in the past when I’ve laid out basically any kind of a drawing using a drawing or architectural program, I’m basing it on known distances instead of eyeballing it and all of those programs had built in rulers. I realize with being able to scale in UE, might complicate the situation.
Is there a set size for a Terrain Component? Or is that scalable too? Thanks!
Weird the line tool isn’t working - i guess you’ll have to troubleshoot that if you really want to, but to be honest i didnt even know the thing existed until I saw people asking about it.
The grid and snapping is your best friend.
The grid is automated, it changes scale based on how far you zoom in or out. It goes by metric system, so it just goes from cm to m to km, etc.
You can easily get some size references by dragging in a cube from the place actors panel. Default cube is 1m. If you scale it by 10, then it’s 10 meters, and so on.
If you don’t like popping in and out of ortho views, you can just set the scale of a few cubes - 10 meters long, 5 meters tall, 200 meters wide, etc etc. Move those around to use as your references.
Or drag in default mannequin for human reference. It is just about 2m tall.
With the translation snapping it also goes by metric. Just drag in your 1m cube and try out the different snapping settings and you’ll see what they refer to.
The default unit of measurement in unreal is centimeters. So if you set a characters max walk speed in movement component for instance to 300, that is 300cm per hour. To convert to km/h you just google the conversion rate, etc.
OK, thanks, bringing in some reference pieces might be the way to go. If I had a recommendation for the devs it would be to include an easy way to layout measurements in a scene. I found this:
Basically it seems like each quad as represents on the terrain component is one meter each, if that is what I’m looking at. When it is set at 63x63 quad per component (1 section per component) and 8x8 components then the entire tile is 504 x 504 meters, so each component is 63 meters long 206’ and 8 components would be 1648’. I still prefer feet.
As someone who is new to this, say I want a 30’ long path, 100’ of buffer behind me, and then a 50’ wide clearing, etc, and I’ve got a reference point in the middle say a hill, I want to know how far from the edge of the terrain the central hill should be, especially if I have made that feature with terrain. My impression is that hill can’t just be picked up and moved like an asset. It would have to be resculpted. I guess you could slide the terrain over, but you are still working with the edges of it as a limitation (I think).
Now regarding terrain. Let’s say you are going to have a medium sized level, but to cover yourself, you make a big ■■■ terrain. Now if most of that terrain is there, but in the end it is not used except to lay down a texture, would this drag performance down if most of that could not be seen?
Btw, is there a way to trim off excess terrain? As I said I’m kind of new.
Terrain size in unreal is exceedingly confusing. The best thing you got is google “unreal terrain technical guide”.
You cannot easily break a terrain into pieces. It is not a regular polygonal mesh. It operates much like the grid does - the further away from it you are, the larger it’s geometry grows, the closer you get, the smaller the geometry gets. This is the key idea behind Level of Detail, aka LOD’s.
But Terrains is kind of an advanced subject to be honest - you have to understand how level of detail works in 3d in general, and then understand what the purpose of a terrain is on a technical level. You don’t have to have advanced knowledge to use terrains to a basic level, but to be able to make them be a desired size and understand and measure performance implications does get into advanced territory.
Will extra terrain drag down performance? You just have to test and see. Depends on one million factors. Hardware, platform, resolution, shaders - nobody can say, you have to test and see. You can use world composition to break a terrain into streamable chunks - but again that is more advanced stuff you probably don’t need to even think about as a beginner.
If are just wanting to get productive making a scene, I’d just drop in a large terrain and go to town. As long as you don’t have the resolution of it turned up stupidly high you won’t notice any slowdown. It could be 100kms wide and probably you wont notice anything unless you have a potato machine.
Get comfortable using unreals placement tools - really they are cream of the crop as far as level designer tools go.
If you are wanting to get serious about realistic natural terrains in unreal, I’d recommend taking a look at world creators guide - they break it down about as artist friendly as you can get. But even that will be a lot to chew on for a beginner. Unfortunately, much of this stuff depends on foundational knowledge you just can’t get overnight.
Fortunately youtube is overflowing with Level Designer/environment artist beginner friendly tutorials. Doesn’t matter if they are great tutorials or not, anybody can get you familiar with the basics of working in unreal, using the placement tools, and so on. A week doing tutorials like that and you’ll be very efficient in blocking out levels.
Thanks much, I appreciate your time. I’ve been busy alternating between Blender and UE Environmental tutorials.
When you talk about the geometry of the terrain grid, I laid out something that did not seem that large when it was flat (mentioned below) and it seemed like the distance grew significantly when I sculpted it, looking much farther away than it should have been. Though scaling I think I can see ways to make something look like it’s a greater disatnce away than it actually is.
I laid down a terrain that is 8x8 (63x63 quads per component) and sculpted it a bit, and like what I saw. Yeah, there is no substitute for getting in there and getting your fingers dirty.
My plan is not to build games, but interactive Zen kinda scenes and so I want a lot of visually enticing stuff in there. Working with terrains and cliffs and a cave, I’m in the process of figuring out where the terrain should stop and where the modeling should begin, but I’ll start another thread with plenty of questions there.
Sounds cool. Probably you don’t need to dive into technicals very far then - what a relief for you :).
Yeah, it can be hard to have a sense of scale until we have some details in the scene. That is why using something common like the mannequin can be so helpful. In fact, if you are just working on artistic scenes, probably you dont necessarily need to even look at any numbers at all, just use a mannequin for human sized reference and base everything aesthetically from that.
