Let's shift our attention over to the Toolbox, which is this vertical strip
of buttons which sits on the left-hand side of your UDK interface.
Now, the Toolbox is broken up into a series of collapsible subsections,
so if you click on the little tiny black triangles located at each one of these sections, you
can collapse them down if you just need to clear up some room.
Though at the default resolution, which is 1280 by 1024 for UDK, it's not
going to take up the whole strip anyway, so you should be good to go there.
What do these sections do? Let's just keep things very high-level, at least
for starters. We have the Mode area, which
allows us to change the mode which UDK is in, we have the Primitives area, which allows
us to change the red Builder brush to a variety of different shapes to create geometry for
our level. We have our CSG area, which allows
us to create Additive and Subtractive brushes, as well as Intersect and Deintersect the Red
Builder brush. We have the Special Aired Volume
Area, which is what I'm going to designate it.
It allows us to add special brushes, which are more of a legacy issue than anything
you'll probably find yourself using very often, as well as the Add Volume button, where
you can create all of the different types of volumes for your level, and then finally
we have a Visibility area. What I'm going to do in this video is just
focus on the Mode area and give you sort of a higher level description of what each of
these modes are for, and then as we move through different videos we'll take a look at each
one of the different sections of buttons underneath that.
So, up here at the very top we have Camera mode, which is your default mode for UDK.
Now, just to show it off, I come over here to File > Open, and let's just grab, say,
'VCTF_Necropolis.' Once this loads in, currently we are in Camera mode, which is
where you spend most of your time in UDK. It just means that's we're just moving
around, manipulating objects, kind of doing the general routine.
Now, Geometry mode is a little different. Geometry mode is right next door to Camera
mode, and if you click on that you're going to get the Geometry Tools window, and this
allows you to select a BSP Brush and edit it as if you were looking at a modeling package.
And actually, to make this a little bit easier to see, let's go to File > New, and we'll
just do a new Additive level, and the reason we're doing that is that means we'll
have just a little red Builder brush to look at, and I'm going to maximize the Perspective
viewport, just so things are nice and big. Now, I'm still in Geometry mode, so if
I click on the red Builder brush, you'll notice the polygons of the brush actually
get shaded a bit, and the vertices of the brush become highlighted.
So, we can click on one of these vertices and we can now move it around, thereby changing
the shape of the brush a bit. We can grab an edge, or in this case I grabbed
a polygon, and we can move the polygon. If we click very carefully right on an edge,
we can also select and manipulate edges as well.
Geometry mode is one of those things that you could spend entire sections of videos
covering, and that's what we're going to do, so I'm not going to go too much
further into it here. For now, let me just go ahead and reset this
back to its standard cube, and we'll move on to Terrain Editing mode.
Terrain Editing mode is really only useful if you have a terrain.
So, let's go to File, and let's grab 'VCTF_Sandstorm.' Sandstorm's got
a big batch of terrain all across the floor, being this sandy stuff here.
What I'm going to do is jump into Terrain Editing mode.
This gives you a wide variety of terrain tools that allow you to control the texture that
is placed on a terrain, the elevation at any given area, and it's a brush-based system,
meaning that you can paint different layers of elevation, you can paint different textures
right onto the surface, and again it's one of those things that's kind of worthy
of its own set of videos, but just as a quick demonstration: I'm going to come in here
and grab the Paint tool from the Tools group. I'm going to take my radius and I'm
going to kick that up to somewhere around maybe 300-something.
This is close to 400, but that's okay. We'll give it a little bit of falloff as
well, and I'm going to slide the Terrain Editing window out of the way.
Now, take a look here inside the viewport. You'll see that my cursor is this great
big circular thing. Now if I hold down the Control key and I Left-drag
(so, dragging with the left mouse button), you'll see that I can change the terrain,
so I'm actually pulling the terrain up. If I hold down Control and Right-click, I
can push things back down. So if I want to reshape terrain, I can do
it in this way. Now, there are other tools as well.
For instance, I could go to Smooth and I could hold down Control and Left-click and I can
smooth out my results, so if you want to make a different version of this map with different
terrain, this is one way that you could do it.
Now, let's get out of Terrain Editing mode and let's take a look at Texture Alignment
mode. Texture Alignment mode allows you to move
the textures across a BSP surface in an intuitive manner, rather than having to click on buttons
or punch in numbers. So, it turns out this little walkway up here
is a BSP surface. So here I am in Texture Alignment mode, and
I'm going to jump over to Camera mode just to show you the difference.
As soon as I go into Texture Alignment mode we get this little transformation widget,
available right here. This allows me to move the texture that is
on this BSP surface, so notice as I move it in Y it slides this way, as I move it in X
it slides this way. I can tap the space bar and I can go into
the rotation widget, and I can rotate this texture around, so I can push it all the way
to somewhere around 45 degrees if I'm ever so inclined.
We can also scale it to make the texture larger or smaller.
I have to really slide my mouse pretty far, but you can see those checkers are a lot smaller.
So, it's just a way that you can intuitively adjust your texture right here in your viewport,
without having to worry about going into your Surface properties and clicking on some buttons.
Next we have Mesh Paint mode. When you enter this mode, you're going
to get a nice little window that allows you to change a variety of settings for controlling
what color you're going to be painting, the radius of your brush, the strength of
your brush and so on and so forth. However, demonstrating this would require
that I did some setup on the back-end. In order to see the results of a mesh paint,
you have to have a material that has a vertex color operator inside of it.
Currently, none of these meshes do, so demonstrating it here is not going to work out for us.
Next we have Static Mesh mode. This is kind of a way to help you scatter
static meshes across the surface of your level. To give it a real quick demo I'm going
to open up the Content Browser, and we're going to search for 'Rock,' and let's
click on Static Meshes, and if we take a look here's a little 'S_UN_Rock_SM_Blackspire05c.'
So select that, we'll close out the Content Browser, and while I'm in Static Mesh mode,
I can place meshes on my map by holding down the S key and left-clicking, and it's just
going to place those. I have some settings in here as well.
I can give them a little bit of pre-rotation and Yaw, Pitch, and Roll.
So we just punch in some numbers here and it's kind of a pre-determined rotation
which will take place before the mesh is even placed.
You also have a Rotation Min and Rotation Max, which allow you to randomize rotation.
So if we take our yaw and set this to -30 and our max to 30- in fact let's just do
that for everybody. Or we could just set it to 180 all the way
down, so let's do -180 all the way down, and -180 for the Min, and then we'll do
positive 180 all the way down here, so we could get any rotation, and it could be a
wide variety of different rotations. Now, as I hit S and click, I'm getting different
rotations with each rock that I am dropping. If you were clicking and placing objects just
on the ground all the time, that would be more than enough, you'd be good to go.
However, let's say we just place all of these back to zero, just as an example, also
I'm going to grab more of a directed static mesh, maybe get away from something like this
organic rock, maybe something like a statue. We have this little guy, sort of an Atlas
statue. So let's say we want to place him; if I
hold down the S key and click, I can place this guy right on the ground, no problem.
But what happens if I hold down S and click on the wall? It places him against the wall,
which is okay, it kind of looks a little cool, almost like he's Spiderman in this case,
but what if I wanted him to really be kind of sticking out of the wall? I can hold down
Alt + S and I can click and it will orient that static mesh along with the surface normal.
Hold down Alt + S and I can put these guys right along the wall.
So that's just a quick look at Static Mesh mode.
That wraps up this quick, high level discussion of the various modes that you can put the
That wraps up this quick, high level discussion of the various modes that
you can put the editor in.