Hi everyone. I had a few technical questions about building game levels that have been really holding my back.

It's to do with sticking to the gird in UDK. I've made only one scene in UDK so far, and it was an island with a building on top. There was no real need to worry about the grid. Now I'm focusing on different enviros, trying to address my weaknesses.

Take the below pic for example. You can see that it has beams on either side and windows, etc.

If you were making this scene in UDK, does everything have to follow the grid? I mean, is it best to decide on things like:
- Width of whole room is going to be 1024 units wide,
- length 2048 long, etc?
- Does there need to be even powers of 2 spacing between each of the pillars?
- Should the walkway be say 128 units wide by 2048 long?

I mean, is it this restricting when making proper levels for UDK or can you break away from the grid a bit? Does everything have to be this precise? Or is it acceptable in some cases to just go in in their 3D app and model out the whole thing and just import it into UDK with whatever sizes?

If you guys were planning to make this scene or something similar, how would you plan it out?

Sorry if that was a lot of text for a really basic question, but I've been struggling with it and I hate numbers lol.

Thanks.

Ah the grid...

You don't need to stay in powers of 2. BUT!!! stay in a comfortable factor of 16. (16,32,48,240, 960,...) If for whatever reason this isn't small enough you can drop it to a factor of 8/4/2/1, but you'll start to hate your life when placing the assets in the environment. You can even go higher if the object is really big.

The power of 2 applies to what movement distance you are using inside of UDK. Default is 16, but you can go from 1 to 1024 in the powers of 2.

Not everything needs to be perfectly on the grid either. Like the waterspout in this photo you could scale to whatever you need and place it centered on the wall. No one would know the difference. Actually that's really the only thing from this reference... maybe that pot with red sticks... not really sure what that is though...

Thanks for the tips. So what about say the pillars, would they need to be made to the grid? Say the room length for example, should it be a set number like 1024 units long, or can it really be anything up to that as long as it is by the power of 2? I mean, would it be wrong to make the whole scene something like 800 units long?

Originally Posted by Hayden Zammit

Thanks for the tips. So what about say the pillars, would they need to be made to the grid? Say the room length for example, should it be a set number like 1024 units long, or can it really be anything up to that as long as it is by the power of 2? I mean, would it be wrong to make the whole scene something like 800 units long?

Doesn't matter in the case of pillars really. As long as the pivot point is placed sensibly. UDK uses 0,0,0 coordinates of the 3d modeling software as the pivot point for the exported mesh.

I wouldn't measure out the room like that. I'd say that each wall section I make will be 128/256/512/(16*n) units wide. Then I place them in the level. If it takes 5 sections then its 5 walls long. I don't really focus on the whole. That occurs after placing the elements.

The pillars don't "need" to be on the grid for this concept, but probably should. Like in the case of that beam going all the way down the hall. That could technically be one long piece of geometry. Doing this will result in processing the parts behind the pillars. So it would be best to find the distance between the pillars and match up the pieces.

I suggest you figure out which pieces can be modular and start trying to puzzle them out so they connect perfectly together. The less covering up you do the better.

The whole room size can really be whatever, once the scale looks right. You will want to try to make your assets fit together by following some sort of standard. If you have say 2 types of trim, but at different lengths, you can't really use those interchangeably...

Sure you can go back into Max or Maya and cut it down to size and try it, but it slows down the process, and makes things less versatile.

So in your case, maybe the spacing between pillars is a certain amount, maybe the width of the room is double that, and I count 6 pillars on the right so 6 times for the length of the hall.

From what I understand, you want to build modular pieces that you can re-use, so while you could perhaps lay it all out in say maya then import it, it'd be inefficient, and dealing with things like collisions etc a pain. So with modular assets you'd piece it together in udk, I don't know of a snap to vertice method in udk just the grid.

So in order to get everything aligned properly it'd make sense to make the most of the grid for quickly laying out your assets and building the scene. You could not respect the grid and layout the modular pieces in your 3d app then copy the xyz values to each asset in udk, that is probably alot slower though..

Everything doesn't have to be the size of the grid, but it should line up on the grid. For instance..your wall pieces should end on grid points...so they snap together perfectly..but your pillars...they can just be centered on the grid point, but they don't have to be..say..2 units wide or anything.

In general though, yes..you should definitely pay attention to the grid...moreso in the earlier stages. You don't need props to line up on grid or anything like that...but anything structural should.

Thanks for all the tips guys. I'm looking to block out a new scene soon. Not the one above. Might come back to this thread when I do if I've got more questions.

Thanks again. Nice to know I don't have to over worry about the grid so much. I really thought things were suppsed to be either, 256 units or 512, 64, 32, etc. Wasn't really sure if it was okay to go anything in between as long as it fits to the grid.

I'm going to try a basic block out in Maya, keeping the grid in mind, then take it into UDK and see how it looks and make sure everything is still on the grid.