Game asset technical question

[Athey]

I've never made anything for either of those engines, unfortunetly, so I can't say anything for sure... But I know that those are both damn good engines (WAAAAY better than the engine we have for the game I'm working on) and our engine even suports 2-sided polys, and open geometry. So chances are you're fine.

[AdamAtomic]

Those engines will be able to display them, but there are 2 possible problems:

1) Another poster mentioned this previously, but open geometry can cause problems when rendering stencil shadows. So in something like DooM3 where that is a big part of the game's look and atmosphere, I would try to keep your meshes manifold.

2) You can not create a BSP hull from open geometry. So while it is perfectly fine for props and detail models to be open, if you are modeling the base hull in a separate program it MUST be manifold!

[zibits]

Thanks for the quick replys, I think I will be fine, but I will try to keep it all mainfold when possible just in case.

Andy :)

[Omita]

Of course... if you are at DigiPen maybe you can find someone to implement those features. :)

[Hourences]

Uncertain about D3 but Unreal supports both things for sure. Both double sideness as well as the ability of having "1 sided open faces". The engine is build for that way of modelling
A thing to keep in mind however is that in Unreal there is vertexlighting and that the lighting will be calculated on one side only of that 2sided sheet. So if you make a wall like that the wall will only receive and display light it receives from one side and forgets the other side. The other side will also be lit the same way as side that has the light..They do cast shadows tho. Best used for Glass and tree leaves and things like that, rather neutral on lighting.

And dont make bsp in Max :)

[FreakyDude]

You can make bsp in max if you really want to. And if you get the hang of it you can do it quite fast too. I kinda hate the way you create brushes in ued. Hammer does that way nicer IMO. easier resizing and setting the size etc.
There's a program called jamlander, which lets you export stuff in 3dmax to unrealed. It's a little buggy and some things don't work. But for laying out BSP I've had little problems.

Start a new scene, set the grid to 16, or 8, or 4 or 2 or 1, or 32/64/128/512 etc. 16 seems more common though.
Make convex shapes, and don't make them to complicated. Aplly an unrealbrush modifier and set it to add/subtract/etc.
export with the export grid settings as low as posibble. This will greatly decrease the leaks you may encounter. Not to get scared of, if there are leaks, you spot them instantly.

I've made some script(well mostly rivendale and galagast did, I recorded something with the macrolistener, and asked them how I should alter it to do what I wanted it to do)
that makes my work in max/jamlander easier.
I layout a set of convex splines. Hit the button, they get extruded, normals flipped for subtract brush only, collapsed, editbrush mod added as instance to all selected objects,
and voila, you have your bsp layout ready to bring to ued.
It's a trick, but I find it usefull nonetheless.
unless, hourences might know of a way to make altering brushes(create and rescale a cube for instance) more like hammer/codradiant) I'll basically stick to that.

[Hourences]

I can create brushes 5 times faster in UED than in Radiant, if you use the normal way of typing in size numbers like you are prolly doing it is indeed slower but you got all kinds of work arounds around that. Ued supports facedrag and vertex edit. Make a cube, quickly drag the sides to where you want, hit substract, move cube do the same again etc. Goes really fast and since its substrative geometry you dont need to worry about making things hollow either. Hell you dont even need to substract. Substract once and reuse the already substracted brush.
I dont know what Jamlander does with the exports but I cant imagine it does a lot with it, creating BSP in max is suboptimal and should only be done for very specific situations (caves and terrain, not needed anymore in current Unreal engine anyway) and when you know what you are doing OR when the shape is extremely simple. Such as a few cubes. For anything else its pointless, slow and more dangerous. The grid is one thing, and the more you use it the smaller the chance is that you might get bsp errors but the workflow is another thing. Unless Jamlander did something about it your brushes will likely be triangulated, that means youre stuck with a few thousand weirdly shaped brushes and surfaces in UED, great to texture and select or lightmap...Great when another brush cuts trough it too, youll get really weird shapes then which also increase the chance on BSP errors. And when you do have a BSP error you cant fix it anymore if its 1 giant Max bsp brush...you need to start up max, change it in there, export it, import it, substract again, reset all orders of all objects and brushes that were added later (!) and rebuild and hope its fixed now. I can imagine faster ways...
Same problem occurs when later on you want to make a corridor wider for gameplay purposes or move other such things or when you want to make elements semisolid to save performance unless jamlander does all of that as well

Can export a brush as ase or dxf too, no need for jamlander.

[zibits]

Of course... if you are at DigiPen maybe you can find someone to implement those features. :)

Touche. :)

But us artists don't fraternize with them programmers much, the smell can be overpowering.

-Andy :)

ps - don't take offense anyone, I actually used to be in the programming department.

[zibits]

Best used for Glass and tree leaves and things like that, rather neutral on lighting.

And dont make bsp in Max :)

Tree leaves was one of the main reasons I posted this. Thanks for the info!

[FreakyDude]

I can create brushes 5 times faster in UED than in Radiant, if you use the normal way of typing in size numbers like you are prolly doing it is indeed slower but you got all kinds of work arounds around that. Ued supports facedrag and vertex edit. Make a cube, quickly drag the sides to where you want, hit substract, move cube do the same again etc. Goes really fast and since its substrative geometry you dont need to worry about making things hollow either. Hell you dont even need to substract. Substract once and reuse the already substracted brush.
I dont know what Jamlander does with the exports but I cant imagine it does a lot with it, creating BSP in max is suboptimal and should only be done for very specific situations (caves and terrain, not needed anymore in current Unreal engine anyway) and when you know what you are doing OR when the shape is extremely simple. Such as a few cubes. For anything else its pointless, slow and more dangerous. The grid is one thing, and the more you use it the smaller the chance is that you might get bsp errors but the workflow is another thing. Unless Jamlander did something about it your brushes will likely be triangulated, that means youre stuck with a few thousand weirdly shaped brushes and surfaces in UED, great to texture and select or lightmap...Great when another brush cuts trough it too, youll get really weird shapes then which also increase the chance on BSP errors. And when you do have a BSP error you cant fix it anymore if its 1 giant Max bsp brush...you need to start up max, change it in there, export it, import it, substract again, reset all orders of all objects and brushes that were added later (!) and rebuild and hope its fixed now. I can imagine faster ways...
Same problem occurs when later on you want to make a corridor wider for gameplay purposes or move other such things or when you want to make elements semisolid to save performance unless jamlander does all of that as well

Can export a brush as ase or dxf too, no need for jamlander.

Yeah I know of most of these things too. most particularly the ase and dxf were fun to mess around with. The early version of jamlander screwed up static meshes' uvw coordinates, you could fix it by manually editing the .ase files.
I have no doubt you can make bsp faster in ued than codradiant or hammer. Let alone jamlander, but I can make some funny bsp with it. It's nothing you would consider groundbreaking probably, but then again, we're not all professional people. Some of us do this just for fun.
The errors you speak of when you build bsp with jamlander. They too will occur, but these same errors can also occur in ued if you're starting out or just a little sloppy. Plus, I know how to avoid these errors when using this plugin. If the size is wrong, I can edit it in max and export again, I never begin editing the rest in if the base isn't set. Or I can edit it afterwards with ued. These leaks are more a matter of sloppy workflow than the export in itself.

The only thing new is the face drag. For some reason it never worked in my editor. But it is true that complex shapes are easier made in ued, than exported with jamlander, because it doesn't like to complex shapes. concave or convex.

Edit:
You are correct about it is better to make bsp in unreal. But I knew of a way to build it in max. I've gotten okay results with it, so I mentioned it. Face drag makes brush editing more interessting, I've followed tutorials about it, but they didn't work without editing the complete brush. Do you know what I may have been doing wrong?

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