Now, let's move on down the toolbox here on the left-hand side.
Take a look at the Primitives area. Now, the idea behind this area of buttons
is that you're going to be changing the red builder brush into the shape of whatever
these primitives happen to be. So if you just start left-clicking - for example,
if I start clicking on the Cone Button, you'll notice that the red builder brush converts
into this rather rudimentary cone shape. We can click on Cylinder, we can click on
Curved Staircase, and you're just starting to change the shape of the red builder brush.
Extremely straightforward. Now if you right-click on any one of these,
you get the settings for that particular Primitive. For instance, if we right-click on Cube, we
get some settings for its dimensions in X, Y, and Z; its wall thickness, which is only
going to be affected if you switch on the Hollow operation - this will give you a Cube
that is hollow on the inside, and then you can set the wall thickness to how thick the
walls are. It's pretty straightforward.
And each one of these is going to have different settings.
For example, if we jump over to the Cylinder, we have the Z Height, we have the Inner Radius
and the Outer Radius, which again, Outer Radius is going to be most useful if we switch on
Hollow. So, again, all of these are going to be a
bit different.
Now, I'm not trying to chase you away from any of these operations, but generally speaking,
in a best-case scenario, you're really only going to be using cubes, occasionally
a cylinder, and very very occasionally, a cone.
Now most of these other primitives - again, in a best- case scenario - you wouldn't
use as a brush. You would actually bring in a static mesh.
For instance, a tetrahedron - if we click on this, we get a diamond-shaped thing.
In fact, I'm going to hold down the L key and rotate around it so you can get an idea
what it looks like. But if we right-click on its settings, we
can take the Sphere Extrapolation and start to increase that.
So if we set that to, say, 4, and click Build, we get something that looks a lot like a sphere.
However, this would be highly inefficient if we were to create it out of BSP geometry.
So as a general rule of thumb, you don't ever want to do this.
But, if you're in a pinch and you do not have access to a 3D modeling application such
as 3DS Max or Maya, then perhaps you have to take this route.
And the same is true of the staircases. So, if we click on a staircase, you'll
see that we're starting to get kind of a nice curved staircase - if we right-click
on its settings, we have some various things we can control here, the Inner Radius, the
Step Height, the Step Width, the Angle of the Curve, the total number of the steps,
and by changing these values, we can get different types of staircases.
But this is really not the way that you would optimally create stairs inside your level.
In a best-case scenario you would create your staircase inside of an exterior modeling package,
again, like 3DS Max or Maya, and bring it in as a static mesh, not as a BSP brush.
The textures are very hard to get positioned just right, and it's just not efficient
in terms of the Engine. But if you're in a pinch, and you have
to do it, this is where you can do it from. Now, a curved staircase is going to run all
the way to the ground. You'll notice as the stairs get higher
they're all based at ground level. If we switch up to a Spiral Staircase, the
stairs will keep wrapping over themselves, and they don't reach all the way to the
ground. So as you change the settings, you could potentially
make a spiral that just goes clear out into the distance.
And players can run on these - they work just fine, but again, I would try to push you away
from using these if you could avoid it. Now, at the very bottom, we have cards, and
what this allows you to do is to create two volumetric cards here, so if you had kind
of a foggy material on these, you could place these in the distance and they would look
kinda like fog. In older Unreal games, you could use these
things for chains, and torch lights and all sorts of stuff like that.
These days, that sort of thing is generally handled through either static meshes or particle
systems, and so the Cards Primitive is not something you'll find yourself using very
often, but if you need it, it's here. So, that is a quick look at the various types
of Primitives. Now, I haven't really talked about the
next group yet, but just to make sure we're completely clear, really all these Primitive
buttons are doing is just changing the shape of the red builder brush.
Then you would use your CSG operations, either through the next group of buttons - we'll
talk about in the next video - or by coming up to the brush menu and choosing CSG, add/subtract,
intersect or de-intersect, in order to push that along.
So, that is a covering, there's a discussion of the Primitive buttons,
and that will wrap up this video.