creating floors for video game environ.

snake85027

I would just say that for me the hardest part to creating an environment in the flooring of the level. I would like advice and screen shots of wire frames of game levels that you guys can show. Hopefully current work like mass effect 2, uncharted 2, gears 2, really could be anything. I was just playing mass effect 2 and looking at the flooring of the ship and I could not tell if it was planes that were cut and unwrapped or models that were set together or both... hopefully this doesn't sound confusing.

DarthNater

When I create floors, I simply create a cube, (usually around 256x256x8). Then I will create three to four variations of flooring (like tile, panels, whatever) as textures. Once I get these textures in ue3, I take the variations a step further by using material instancing and my favorite material node (lerp!). You can easily get 10 different looking materials from those original textures.

If time permits, I may even sculpt some tiles in zbrush and bake those out, but most of the time just using textures and creating a normal from that is enough... sorry I don't have any images for you, I'm on my phone atm and not near a computer

snake85027

When I was working in unreal I was using BSP for the ground and now I am thinking that was a mistake because it limits patterns,designs and control of what you can do.
when I see something like the image below from mass effect and I dont think they used any BSP for the scene.

Do most people build out the ground in maya or max and then just put a collision box on it and call it a day or do they use BSP cubes?

while playing the game I was just thinking of their methods of design. Did they make the entire flooring/scene in max or maya all at once? Are most levels built out entirely in max or max and then everything is imported?

nfrrtycmplx

Making a floor is really no different than making the walls/ceilings... the difference is that the player has to walk on them... that's the only difference.

The only thing you have to worry about is what the collision is doing.

So long as you understand what the player needs to do, and how they need to traverse the space in a particular area, you should be able to figure out what the collision needs to do ... this usually comes from a prototype of the level/space. After you know what the collision needs to do, then you decorate it.

Most things can be achieved with static meshes (ue) in combination with BSP and/or height-field terrain.

claydough

nfrrtycmplx wrote: »

Most things can be achieved with static meshes (ue) in combination with BSP and/or height-field terrain.

I was under the impression that floors in UE had to be bsp or terrain.
Is this not or no longer the case?

Lamont

claydough wrote: »

I was under the impression that floors in UE had to be bsp or terrain.
Is this not or no longer the case?

No, you can use a mix. Take a look at any UnrealED level, you will see a mix of SM/BPS/terrain. It's all about getting that look you want.

As for ME, I am going to say all static mesh. It's a relatively small scene on the Normandy, so to deal with the massive amounts of StaticMeshes/Actor counts, you have doors/elevators/long hallways which serve as loading points.

snake85027

Thanks for the replys. Now in that photo of the Normandy. The tiling texture that the two figures are standing under and the other tiling texture that leads to the door way. Is that all one model and just have multi materials applied to it or do you think its seperated? If anyone has any wireframes of the normandy Id like to see them. Its just that some of the textures fit so well together that I cant tell if they are two different models or just one model that has many cuts and different materials and uv applied.

I might be making to much of this. I just find it interesting to disect art.

Eric Chadwick

If you have a PC game you like, one way to dissect how it was built is to use a ripper to extract meshes & textures, then load those into a modeling app. The FFXI Model Viewer is another cool one.

Lamont

I gonna guess that it is two materials for that walkway. My reason is that if it were two meshes, it would have the flashies at the edges. Also think the Verts are stretched to give it that swept look. Will have to take a look when I play again tomorrow.