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Standard Process for Creating Levels?

polycounter lvl 5
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Fogbrain polycounter lvl 5
Hey guys, I'm making a horror environment atm, and it's set inside a hotel. What I'm wondering is, typically with Unreal Engine, it tends to thrive best on modular assets and workflow, as opposed to cryengine where you can build entire structures in your 3D program and drop it in no problem with texturing, materials or lightmaps.

Typical mid 20th century hotels or housing has just flat walls and square like rooms. I was wondering if you can just use Geometry Brushes (or BSPs) for the environment's walls, roof and floors? Or does an asset like a wall have to be made to replace the brushes, and geo brushes have to be only used during the blockout phase of level design.

This much I wonder since there really is a specific way to create your levels down the line. I guess I'm asking what the workflow is for this kind of thing and the best way to go about it.

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  • Steppenwolf
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    Steppenwolf polycounter lvl 15
    Just because Epic tends to use lots of small modular parts doesn't mean you have to do it exactly the same way. You should be fine dropping in large structures.

    BSP is just there for prototyping now i believe. You can turn it into models inside the editor if you don't need anything more fancy for a wall.
  • GlowingPotato
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    GlowingPotato polycounter lvl 10
    Hey Fogbrain.


    I'am the artist responsible for this game here -> http://store.steampowered.com/app/251170/

    We use our own game engine (9gears) inside the studio, but the asset creation pipeline won't change much.

    One of our levels its a hotel. The idea of the game is to use "randomization" as much as possible, including the levels.

    - Every room was build inside Maya.
    - Every room should be able to attach to another room/corridor.
    - Almost every texture (for the rooms/corridors) its tileable.
    - Decoration objects and furniture was modeled separated from the environment.

    We made heavy use of a second UV set for decal mapping.

    But i advise using large chunks of geometry. Many separated objects is not the best practice for any DirectX engine.

    Modularity works really well for some kind of environments, and not that well for others.

    I think that the main reason to use modularity in unreal, its because the engine is GREAT when rendering instanced objects, saving a lot of draw calls, render time and VRAM. But its not a mandatory thing....
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