Greybox Preparation

3DRyan

So, what does it mean for an environmental modeler to "prepare a greybox"? I saw it in the responsibilities description for a job, and until now, I've never heard of it. I know that it's a cross between black box and white box testing for games, and I know what they entail, but where does an environmental modeler come into play, that he has to "prepare" it?

Em.

Means different things to different people/companies. I would assume that you'd have to create block-out objects that estimate the footprint of the object it will eventually be(with collision)to block-out play space in-game. Or, for a level designer/editor/world builder to take said block-out 3D pieces and do block-out versions of levels.

Justin Meisse

model out a rough layout with placeholder art.

From my experience: designer hands me a basic drawing of the level layout with run-times between capture points, I know a character can run x-units/second so I measure out and place capture points and plop boxes down representing various buildings and what-not.

Emil Mujanovic

Basically what Em. and Justin pointed out. It's just blocking in the environment, it's handy for gameplay testing, creating test puzzles, timing, etc. It gives the Level Designer a working playable level to work from while the Environment Artists work on making it pretty.

The term greybox comes from building the levels with basic geometry (like boxes for instance) and it's generally untextured (flat grey). There are times that the team would use grid textures for scale reference to make sure jump heights and things are accurate.

The name will vary from studio to studio. We called it blueboxing at my old studio, primarily because we used a blue texture with a white grid.

adam

At Relic, for Space Marine, our level designers create their levels in our editor using, quite literally, greyboxes. From there we can export that geometry to layers in Max and use it as guides for the environments we build.

There's more than just grey boxes to this initial pass, but you should get the idea.

If you don't, watch this and pause it at 1:26.

D-Robe

Hey everybody, I'm new to all this too.
So when playing custom CS:S maps (made in the Hammer editor I think) you often see them made of orange untextured boxes sometimes with 128x128 or something written on them. I take it these would be 'grey box' maps?

rooster

this is probably a pretty good example too:
http://artpass.tf2maps.net/

ZacD

Its common to also use already existing props and quickly scale them if needed, even if it wont be the final version of a prop, having a ladder or stairs, or something else in place allows the designer to visualize the map a bit more and allows them to run around and get a feel for whats working and what needs tweaking.

PredatorGSR

D-Robe wrote: »

Hey everybody, I'm new to all this too.
So when playing custom CS:S maps (made in the Hammer editor I think) you often see them made of orange untextured boxes sometimes with 128x128 or something written on them. I take it these would be 'grey box' maps?

Yep, when working on source mods it was referred to as making a map with "dev textures", which meant the orange grid ones, but it means exactly the same thing.

Slum

I always assumed valve's Orange Box got it's name from their orange-box blockin phase for building levels.

3DRyan

Awesome! This clears it up. I've actually done this before, just didn't know the actual terminology. Thanks everyone.

D-Robe

Slum wrote: »

I always assumed valve's Orange Box got it's name from their orange-box blockin phase for building levels.

I thought that was just to differentiate it from "The Black Box", a planned retail release of just Valve's new content, but I could be wrong.