Creating assets for RTS Terrain, Need Pipeline help

Brian "Panda" Choi

Hey Polycount:

So at USC, we're making an RTS in UDK.

How do I go about creating modular pieces of flat terrain that level designers can fit together on their own?

My conceptual understanding of how I want this to work:



Talking with another engineer, he remarks that what would be efficient is to use the PAID UDK to do mesh compositing, but our game is only using the free UDK Editor.

Right now I'm looking 2 solutions then:

1. Have the designers greybox the flat terrain in Maya, and we UV map that on to a large texture or several, and then import the FBX to Maya. Assign Material to the "world mesh." Repeat process as iterations are made.
2. Each block in the UDK Editor is assigned its own material, so designers can do the construction in the Editor, but we can't vertex paint across several different tiles.

joeriv

JadeEyePanda wrote: »

[*]Each block in the UDK Editor is assigned its own material, so designers can do the construction in the Editor, but we can't vertex paint across several different tiles.
[/LIST]

Maybe I understand you wrong, but you don't need to assign a seperate material to each tile.
You can just assign a material instance to the mesh in the content browser.
And if you need different ones(different texture for example), just import multiple version of that mesh with their seperate material instance.
So you would tile_Grass, tile_Sand for example.

So you don't have to go assigning like 100 tiles their own material.

on vertex painting multiple meshes, first google result:
http://forums.epicgames.com/threads/971109-Could-i-possibly-make-it-so-i-can-vertex-paint-multiple-objects-as-once

Brian "Panda" Choi

So we should be able to make the square tiles and have design oomposite them in the Editor?

joeriv

as long as you stick to the udk grid size, and that trick from that link actually works properly to vertex paint multiple tiles at once then it should work fine.

ambershee

Stick with the UDK grid and you'll be fine. Take a look at how the older CnC games did isometric tiles, and that should give you an idea of how to construct your meshes.

Personally, I feel your LDs should be using landscape for the bulk of the playable area, which mesh work for cliff of a defined height and such.