Advice Please - Blocking out a large urban scene
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I have never done a proper blockout before. I am working on a level now for UDK. It is a fairly large urban scene. I ultimately want to create a few modular sets and snap them together to follow my blockout.
The game will take place in this specific part of Brooklyn. I probably won't stick exactly to the real world map, but I would like to stay as close as I can. I have a few blocks here from google maps as a guide.
Here is the approximate playable area:
So far all I have done is figure out that a 49,152 units grid for the whole map will be very close to real world scale. I have a ~25,000 unit playable area. I timed it at 1 minute 20 seconds to walk from one side of the level to the other. Not sure if that is too long, I imagine it would take longer while fighting off hordes of enemies.
Many of the shapes for the buildings are trapezoidal, I cut some shapes out along the photo in Max, but now I am not sure that was the best move. Should I use Max or BSP brushes?
How will I make sure everything snaps, when my streets are running at all kinds of wierd angles and so are the buildings?
What would your workflow be to block out this level?
The game will take place in this specific part of Brooklyn. I probably won't stick exactly to the real world map, but I would like to stay as close as I can. I have a few blocks here from google maps as a guide.
Here is the approximate playable area:
So far all I have done is figure out that a 49,152 units grid for the whole map will be very close to real world scale. I have a ~25,000 unit playable area. I timed it at 1 minute 20 seconds to walk from one side of the level to the other. Not sure if that is too long, I imagine it would take longer while fighting off hordes of enemies.
Many of the shapes for the buildings are trapezoidal, I cut some shapes out along the photo in Max, but now I am not sure that was the best move. Should I use Max or BSP brushes?
How will I make sure everything snaps, when my streets are running at all kinds of wierd angles and so are the buildings?
What would your workflow be to block out this level?
Replies
I moved ahead a little and decided to lose all diagonal streets, and get all of the streets I am keeping aligned at 90 degree angles. This greatly simplifies my map. I also noticed that my original plan called for 28 playable city blocks. That sounds like a massive amount of work. In my latest revision I only have 11 playable blocks.
OK so now I think I have my scale issue, and my snapping issue solved. And I am going to use max instead of BSP. It is just easier for me to work with.
But I still don't know what to do next. It is still going to be the biggest map, and a biggest level I ever worked on. I would greatly appreciate any advice.
Specifically: What would your workflow would be to block out a city level like this one?
Here is the latest version of the map in a 3d app
Forget about giving each foot of street it's on unique texture space.
Even if you want the meshes to be unique, you should probably dedicate a portion of your texture space to roads and then overlay your UV's on that section. For example if you use the bottom 1/3rd of your texture for the road and make sure it tiles horizontally, it gives you a little more freedom to slide the UV's horizontally and have them display different parts of the texture. People do this with sidewalks and stairs quite often.
You're tiles can be nothing more than just well measured blocks that get replaced later. When you get to intersections make custom tiles, rotated symmetry modifiers help with this.
Also what you see from the sky isn't half as important as the view you'll see as a player. Accuracy from the sky is over rated unless that is the view the player will see. Even then it doesn't need to match your reference exactly so long as it captures the spirit of the ref.
I read in a few places that I should Block the entire level first and playtest it, change a few things around, make it feel right and then build it. This sounded like a great idea to me! Only I couldn't really find any specific examples of what to do when blocking out a level. Just make a level of blocks? It sounds simple enough at first.
But when I look at my scene, I am a litte intimidated. And very afraid that I will do this the wrong way. It will consist of 11 blocks, about 200 hundred buildings. And it is intersected by train tracks and a creek. There will be quite a lot of things to be built. I was planning to do the programming work myself and pay for help on building the level.
Ideally, I would like to block it out in a way so I can playtest the entire level and quickly be able to change it around until it feels right. Once it feels right and is fun to play with just boxes, I would like to bring in some real artists (I am not an artist) to do the environment.
I am really confused about how to go about blocking it out in a way that would be easiest to change at this stage and easiest for a team of people to be able to replace the blocks for actual game assets.
I have never done anything like this before.
Is the workflow blocking it out with tiles of the size I plan to use?
or something different?
How do the pros do this?
Pros would probably use a plugin
I assume you've googled for building modular structures/things. Here's a tute that might help you get your head around what you are doing when you are creating modular features:
http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/JoelBurgess/20130501/191514/Skyrims_Modular_Approach_to_Level_Design.php
See the rar/ppt from the wiki link:
Modular Environment Design.rar - by Kevin Johnstone
This will, I think, answer your basic question - what to do, how to do it, and has some examples (why try to describe the concept in text when a picture has better bandwidth????)
http://wiki.polycount.com/CategoryEnvironmentModularity
To summarize - you are building not buildings or features, but "modules" that can be assembled together to make bigger things. Key thing is to standardize your units early on, and to use grid snap to ensure that all your assets are built correctly. You'll probably build some simple forms, then assemble those, and possibly assemble those into more complicated structures. As soon as you can begin building things with your modules you will determine what pieces you are missing, try to minimize one-offs.
My .02, worth price charged.
Well... I think you might be biting off quite a bit. For the sake of learning I would scale back your plans quite a bit and focus on a single kit, get it's pivots in the right places, get it so it snaps together and get its dimensions figured out in game.
It helps if the grid in your 3D app matches the grid of your engine. Most engines have a grid that everything snaps to, so working on that same grid in your 3D app is a must. So first make sure those two things are on the same settings.
Maybe start with the street and make a mesh tile. Drop that in your engine and see how it feels, you might want to create a quick sidewalk block and test how that works. Tweak those things as you need to make it feel right.
Adjusting the camera height and player camera speed really affects a players sense of scale so you probably have to spend some time dialing those in also. The higher and faster the player camera moves the smaller things feel, lowering it and slowing it down makes your level seem bigger and takes longer to traverse. Dialing these things in early is critical to moving forward and it's this early balancing that sets the pace for a lot of what is generated.
So for example if your player is 96 units tall and 32 units wide you can create a quick stand-in model and use that to help guide your sense of scale. But different games have different camera speeds and different heights so that may not be accurate.
Once you get the street working, you can start blocking in building facades and doorways. Establishing window heights and dimensions, stairs, railings pieces of cover, barriers and that kind of stuff. Once you have a facade you can create corners and intersections and get your streets going in more than one direction.
Figuring out your scale will help you later when you start unwrapping and texturing things. If you want 4 pixels for every game unit and your mesh tile is 128x128uu game units then you want a map that is 512x512px. Using this kind of rough math will help keep you from making an ultra sharp crate that sits on an ultra blurry floor. But textel density is another discussion for another time, but an important one because texture space and optimization is very important.
You don't want to spend a lot of time making the pieces detailed but you do want them to be fairly accurate. Later when artists come in they can replace the modules with actual art that matches your dimensions and snaps together in the same way.
The whole point of working modular is so that you can make a small number of pieces and reuse them over and over again to flesh out the entire level without having to build every square inch by hand.
I have scaled back the scope. I have photoshop/max/and UDK units adjusted and snapping perfectly on the grid.
I want to do the grey boxing first. I am building this game for occulus. I want to spend a lot of time just playing around with the level in the grey box state. I am probably going to need to make a lot of changes. I really want to make sure that the game is taking full advantage of the headset before I start building.
Are there any special considerations for the "grey boxing" state to make it easier to convert to an actual level with modular pieces, or is the greyboxing state just a rough placeholder that you delete as you build the level?