### Pillars

By: Expandable Jim

Meshes

If you have tried modeling anything complicated yet you will be aware of the most severe limitation of the Unreal engine. The recommended on-screen polygon count is two hundred or less. This is quite low when compared with other games. The best answer to this problem is meshes. Meshes are also used to display players, monsters, weapons, items and special effects. Their main advantage is that they are rendered much more efficiently than polygons in the level geometry. In fact they are handled roughly five times faster.

There are downsides though. Meshes do not handle collision properly. You can give them a cylindrical collision cylinder but objects will collide with the cylinder, not the mesh itself. Meshes are lit by simple vertex lighting, not the more sophisticated lightmap method used for level geometry. This means they cannot have shadows on them but on the positive side they are much more natural when they model curves. If you make a cylinder or cone with brushes you might get something like these pillars:

The lighting system makes it very clear that those pillars are made from flat polygons. This is not the desired effect. Now let us look at meshes:

They could have been better lit, but they do look much rounder thanks to the different lighting system. Both sets of pillars are essentially the same model, but the meshes look nicer.

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Getting your feet wet

The easiest way to start is to try out the decorations in the actor browser:

There are many decorations to choose from. Be sure to expand the ut_Decoration subtree, since half of the decorations are in there. For now, we will use the Barrel.

Right click on the ground where you want to put it and click Add Barrel Here. | Voila! a barrel. It is a little out of place, but it is there nonetheless and appears in the game.

Of course there are more decorations than those found with the game. Many fancy decorations can be found on the internet. Decorations are distributed in .u files. Put these files in your UnrealTournament\system folder. If someone else wants to play a map that uses such decorations, they too will need the .u file in their system folder.

To use these custom decorations, you just need to put them in your system directory and open them from the actor browser. Then hunt around for them in the actor browser. (they will normally be under decoration)

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The good bit

By now you are probably wondering how you can make such decorations yourself. After all, there are many fancy things you want to include in your map that you cannot get elsewhere.

The answer is a third party utility called Meshmaker. This is possibly the best third party utility you can download (there would be heated debate over this, but Meshmaker would be a strong contender). It allows you to convert a .t3d file into a .u file. That is, you can make what you need in UnrealEd, export the brush and convert it into a mesh.

here it is

There is a straightforward tutorial, included with meshmaker, on how to do this.

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The complexities

Meshmaker creates a folder within your game folder with the code and model(s) needed to generate the .u file. If you selected 'create a ready-to-use decoration', it will compile a .u file from that code. If you make many decorations with the same package name all the code will go in one folder, resulting in a .u file that has not one but many decorations. But if you delete that folder and make another decoration with that package name, the resulting .u file will only contain the decoration you just made. Think before deleting those folders.

If you create anything large you may notice strange disappearances like this:

Here we see a large 512 unit high pillar vanish when we look down. This seems to happen when you look away from the centre of the decoration. I am aware of no clever property changes or things like that which fix this. Therefore, avoid using really large decorations. The robot decoration in the actor browser is just under 256 units high and shows this problem, but only if you go right up to it and look straight down.

It is possible to circumvent this problem by making the decoration in parts. This is effective though laborious and may increase the number of polygons in the mesh(es). In the case of a pillar you could extend it some distance downwards through the floor. This would move the center of the decoration down towards eye level and make disappearances less likely. Just be aware that it might make disappearances more likely on high up platforms.

Changing the Advanced->EdShouldSnap property of a decoration to True will make it snap to the grid the way brushes do. This is helpful if you are trying to put pieces together and generally just helpful.

Changing the Advanced->bStatic property to False and the Decoration->bPushable property to True will make it possible to push the decoration around. The size of an object does not make it harder to push.

If the decoration must be solid and that cylinder shape doesn't quite work you need to use an invisible collision hull. The problem with this is that it tends to make the decoration turn black. This is a lighting problem. The solution is to use several invisible collision hulls, avoid the center of the decoration and leave gaps. You can also use blockall actors, which do not make your decoration go black.

| A series of invisible collision hulls. A single solid invisible collision hull would make that boiler go black. Another copy is in the background.

It is possible to use movers to create fake shadows. This is handy when used in conjunction with decorations, which do not leave shadows even though they often should. Place a mover. Put keyframe 0 where no-one will see it(it can sit in solid space) and keyframe 1 in the right place for casting a shadow. Make sure the Mover->bDynamiclight property is False, Mover->WorldRetraceKey is 1 and Mover->Keynum is 0. Also make sure that nothing can trigger the mover.