Whiteboxing!

Ark

Anyone have any tips/papers on whiteboxing.

Having a hard time setting up a good scene scale and keeping my objects in good scale relation to each other when modeling environments.

Is it better to stick to a real world unit scale, or some generic scale?

Does that mean i have to go around measuring what each objects dimensions are? or do people just eye it up til it looks right?

Eric Chadwick

Some here.
http://udn.epicgames.com/Two/WorkflowAndModularity.html

Moar here.
http://wiki.polycount.net/CategoryEnvironment

Mark Dygert

Mostly eye balling, I mesure out box to the player height and use that as a guide. I'll even drop a biped in the scene set to the same height just to get better sense of scale.

It can help to put camera about where head height is, link it to your measuring stick and lock its position, leaving the rotation open for you to look around. You will need to set the near clipping plane so the stick/head is excluded from the camera view.

Max has a handy dandy measuring "tape" tool (Create tab > Helpers > Tape) that makes measuring pretty painless. It really helps to keep to a grid and plot out your modular tiles like Eric pointed out. The grid will become very important in the next few steps after the block out is done.

Ark

Thx for the help, been reading into it a lot today.

Seems simple at first glance but when you get into it, it's a different story.

Mark Dygert

And pretty important too. If you get it wrong it can cause all kinds of headache and rework. If you get it right the next few stages can be a lot easier.

Kudos for even investigating it in the first place!