UDK Player scale

Bleah

I'm going to run the risk of looking like an idiot by posting this, but I just wanted to make sure before I start a fairly big udk project.

I've started blocking out the level I'm looking to create and I've been finding scale problems when trying to create realistic size doorways and railings, they look fine from far away but seem to get very narrow while walking through them. From what I've read its not really a problem with UT3 Maps as they're built to be quite big for all the movement in unreal.

The example below is using a 64 W x 112 H Doorway and my question is, firstly am I just going insane and imagining it, or is it really a problem and if so, can it be fixed?

Snight

Well 16 Unreal units = 1 foot. So technically your door is 4x7 feet tall. I believe the characters in Unreal are roughly 6 feet tall and have some pretty bulky armor on, so you may want to over exaggerate a bit.

Will Faucher

I've always gone by 120 units for an average height character.

kdm3d

• How tall is a character? - UT3/UDK
• This depends from game to game. Developers can freely configure the size of a character. A UT3 character is roughly 90-96 units high, a GOW character comes in at 160.

from: http://www.hourences.com/book/tutorialsue3faq.htm

Bleah

I guess I didn't really explain myself properly but you've all answered my question anyway, and thanks for the Hourences link, last time I checked I didn't notice that many tutorials

gauss

One of the guys on the UDK forum swears up and down that 1 unreal unit = 2 cm, which sounds about right. That would put the UT3 characters at around 6'2 and the GOW characters at about 10 feet--though of course both of those worlds play pretty fast and loose with scale.

It's next to useless establishing anything like a "real" scale for the existing UDK assets because they're all made for dude huges bunny hopping around. I built a design test with UDK and a "reasonable" seeming fence asset appeared to be closer to 20 feet tall.

My suggestion would be to establish a reasonable play height calibrated to either that standard (1 uu = 2 cm) or scale it up or down depending on your project. If it's a third/first person game that scale should do fine. Obviously you'll want units that play nice with other typical metrics, which it does seem to--with that metric a 128 uu wall is roughly 8.3 feet tall. Given most residential buildings put their ceilings at 8', that's a pretty good way to go. You want to make sure the building blocks of the world are grid snappable.

Additionally I would strongly suggest downloading Hammer and checking out the dev textures for L4D or HL2 or really most of the HL2 games. They're not perfect--the doors are really much too tall as I recall offhand--but the dev textures calibrate consistent heights for things like desks, stair riser/tread, railings, all that kind of thing. Getting those things down and feeling "right" are really going to save headaches later so I applaud you taking the time now as you ought.

If I sound like I've thought about this it's because I have, I intend to do much of the above shortly myself

Froyok

http://wiki.beyondunreal.com/Legacy:Unreal_Unit and http://udn.epicgames.com/Three/UnrealUnits.html

• 256 UU = 487.68 cm = 16 feet.
• 1 meter = 52.5 UU
• 1 foot = 16 UU
• 1 cm = 0.525 UU
• 1 UU = 0.75 inches

Under the source engine, by default a wall is thick of 8 unit, I share the same principle in the UDK. I use the same size as under the soruce engine. With the soruce engine you have comon size : a wall = 128*128 unit, etc.

gauss

Thanks for that Froyok, that's very close to what I had heard with 1 uu = 2 cm. I knew they'd peg the most common dimensions (wall widths etc) to something nice and snappable.

Very interesting that "most licensees" use a scale of 1 uu = 1 cm. Would be nice to get more info on that, the where and why. The GOW tweak is for making cover more sensible.

UE3 treats one Max Unit as one Unreal Unit,

Woot yeah this makes life a whole lot easier alright

vahl

above any realistic statement, what one should first take into account when creating a playable level is how it "feels" once ingame, sometimes, you have to make things bigger or smaller than what they should be, just so that they "feel" they are correctly sized ingame.
I read somewhere, I believe it was a GDC paper from remedy, that for max payne, any object that would be close to the player/camera would be slightly oversized to keep that "feel" and make it play well with gameplay limitation (room size vs camera distance, camera collision, etc).

What I would suggest here would be to either find a compromise between distance view and FPS scale "feel", play with the fov, or make the door wider (double panel door for instance) to keep realistic dimensions.