Beginners UnrealED2
Tutorial by EZkeel Part 2

EZkeel@nikodemus.demon.co.uk

Contents

1) New Rooms
2) Manipulating vertices
3) Solid Brushes
4) Textures
5) Shortcuts

OK, this time we're going to do some more adventurous stuff with UnealED. In the first part, you learned how to navigate the editor, create a room and add some stuff to it. This time you're going to add more connecting rooms and add some more stuff.

1) New Rooms

First you need to load in the map you made last time (unless moving straight on to this tutorial from the first one). To do that click on file at the top of the editor screen, choose open and then select your map from the browser.

You should see everything as you left it, but your 4 windows will probably have reset to the center of the grid. Make sure that you can see your room in all 4 windows and that nothing in your screen is selected (left click on a blank part of the grid to make sure).

Now, to create a new room you need to use that red brush outline again (the building brush). When nothing else is selected you can move the building brush and do what you like with it. Unless you've been experimenting, the builder brush should be exactly covering the room that you created, so what you need to do in the top left 2D view (viewing from above) is press the Ctrl key down, left click and drag the building brush away from it. In the 2D views you should see the red brush move, and leave behind a brown square which is the outline of the room you've already made.

Still dragging the red brush, move it so that it is exactly 4 squares above it, but still lined up with your other room like this:

Now, you don't want to see the same old boring cube for a room do you? No way!
Lets change the size so it looks a little different. When you start up UnrealED it always begins with the default size of 256 x 256 x 256 for your cube. To change this, you need to right click on that cube shape which you used to make your brush. This will immediately display a small new window that says "Cube Builder" and you should now see a new window pop up that looks like this:

Change each of the numbers to: Height 512, Width 512 and Breadth 512 and then hit "build" (I chose these numbers because they are multiples of 16 and snap nicely on to the grid). Close the window down and now look at your 2D view. You'll see that the builder brush is twice as big. You can change these dimensions to anything you like (but make sure they're all greater than 1). We don't want our two rooms to overlap, so move the builder brush so that there is about 4 squares gap between them again.

Check out the other two 2D views and you'll probably see that your new box has its floor lower than your previous room. Just move it up in one of those views so that it's on the same level as the other one.

Now choose a texture you like (explained in the previous tutorial) and press the "subtract" icon again (2nd button down on the right of the left-hand toolbar).
Add a light to it the same way as you did in the previous room, rebuild and save it again.

So, how do we connect these two rooms up? We just create another brush like the previous two and make it fit in between them.

This might be tricky, so take your time with this.
There are several ways of doing this, but I only ever use two (just personal preference I suppose). You can either use a calculator to sit and work out how many units big your connecting brush needs to be and then slip it in there (which is the method I used to use a lot). Or you can do it the way that I'm going to show you now which will help you to learn something new.

Right click on the cube again, set the dimensions to 256 x 64 x 64 and hit build. Close the window and look at where the new size brush is on the top left 2D view again. I doubt if this lines up with your two rooms, but we're going to put it there anyway. ?

Click on the "subtract" icon so that it carves your cube out into a room.
Now, here's where the fun starts! Move the red brush out of the way and left click on one of the brown sides of your new room (it should be smaller than the others so zoom in if you need to). The whole brush should turn from brown to yellow, which means you've selected it. Press the Ctrl key down and with the left mouse button still pressed drag the yellow box so that one of the sides exactly touches the sides of one of your other rooms.

Note: If you screw up at any point, there are two useful things for you to know: Firstly, I've found that one of the most useful tools in UnrealED is "undo". Just click on the undo icon to retrace your steps, you'll find it can trace itself all the way back to the last time you rebuilt the level!
Secondly, if you need do away with one of the brushes that you added earlier, simply select it by clicking on it and then hit the delete key on your keyboard and it will vanish from your 2D views (it won't be removed from your 3D view until you rebuild.) Anyway, back to business ...

Now, if you wanted to, you could select the room that's on its own and drag it down to meet the other end of your new brush. But supposing you don't want to move that room. Lets say we want to actually stretch our new room so that it can touch the other one. Here's how you do it.

2) Manipulating vertices.

You'll notice that each corner of your cube has a small dot on it. That's a vertex, and we can move these to change the shape of the room. To move them you need to click on the vertex you want to move so that it turns into a small red star, then hold down the Alt key. With the Alt key held down, and the left mouse key pressed, you can drag this point where you like, so drag it to meet up with the side of the other room. Make sure the line is dead straight or it might give you trouble later. You need to do this with each of the 4 points from that edge. Check it out in all the 2D views to make sure that you have lined it all up nicely. You might have noticed that nothing much has happened in the 3D view, that's because that view is limited as to what it can track.

You may find that you are having trouble getting the vertices to go where you want ! If so, there are things that you can do stop you from swearing at your PC. You probably need to change the "grid size". Your vertex will only feel comfortable if it fits snugly onto the corner of one of your grey grid squares, so to be able to do that, you need to make them smaller. To do that, just right click somewhere on one of the 2D views in an empty part of the grid and choose "grid", then choose a smaller number like 4 from the drop down menu.

Once you're happy with how it looks (you should have three areas all joined up), you can press F8 and rebuild your level. Once that's done, you should see it in all its glory on the 3d view too. (Remember to save it after rebuilding).

3) Solid brushes.

Well, now you've got two really interesting rooms connected by another really interesting corridor! Lets add a solid clock in the middle of the large room.
This time we'll use something different to a cube. Underneath the cube shape is a cylinder shape. Right click the cylinder shape and set the height to 128 and the outer radius to 64. Click on build and your red brush will turn into a cylindrical octagon ! Position it somewhere inside your large room (preferably aligned with the floor) and choose a texture you like from the right hand menu. This time instead of "subtracting" this brush to make a hole, we're going to "add" the brush to make a solid object.
In the tool bar on the left, click on the icon next to the "subtract" icon called "Add". You should see the cylinder appear in your 3d view window. Voila ! As before rebuild (F8) and Save (you really need to get into the habit of doing that).
Experiment with some of the different shapes and see what you can come up with.
Note: If you add a brush and it overlaps a light that you've added, your lighting will be stifled !

4) Textures.

So far you've learned how to add and subtract brushes, and put items into your room. But what if you want to change the appearance of one of your surfaces?
Left click on the floor of your room in the 3D view and it should look shaded. Now, if you like, you can choose a different texture, and when you click on it, the floor will change to that texture. With the floor still selected press F5 and you should see this ...

You can have plenty of fun with this tool. Try checking a few of the boxes and see what it does when you run the map (remember to rebuild and save).
Here is a brief list of what these functions do (they may not mean much to you now, but you may need to refer back to them later).

Invisible: Makes the surface invisible (useful if you want to make an invisible wall that blocks the player)
Masked: Enables you to use a masked texture (choose the masked category from your texture set to see what I mean)
Translucent: Makes the surface transparent.
Force View Zone: Beats me!
Modulated: Check it out !
Fake Backdrop: Used for Skyboxes (see skybox tutorial)
2-sided: used for a "sheet" brush (see tutorial on ZONES)
U-pan and V-pan: Makes your texture scroll horizontally and vertically (useful for water or sky)
Hi and Lo Shadow detail: Different ways of responding to lights.
No Smooth: No idea
Special Poly: Not sure, may have something to do with parots.
Small Wavy: This should make you surface wiggle about like rippling water.
Dirty shadows: This will obscure your surface, making it appear gloomier.
Bright Corners: Sometimes, you have a tiny brush cut out of a surface that won't respond to lights, use this to get results !
Special lit: When your light actor is also set to special lit, your surface will only respond to that as its light source.
No Bounds Reject: Duh, wha? come again? ...
Unlit: The surface will look just as it does in your browser, and doesn't respond to lights. Good for neon signs or control panels.
Portal: uses your surface to be a side of a "zone"
Mirror: Turns your surface into a reflective surface (click transparent as well, and you get a shiny floor !)

You'll also notice the other tabs at the top of the window. Again, feel free to experiment, but here's what they do:

Rotation: Enables you to rotate your surface, try it.

Pan: You can shift your texture sideways or up and down to match textures that are next to it. Just press the squares and you'll see the texture start to move by the amount in the check boxes (1,4,16 and 64)

Alignment: Another tool to help you get surfaces matching perfectly, you can also do the same by right clicking on your surface and choose "align textures"

Scale: This is useful. By choosing a ratio in the "simple" scaling box, you can enlarge or reduce the texture on your surface.

Experiment with all these settings, its the best way to learn. :)

That's it ! Have fun and create some monster levels.
I'm pretty sure you now know the basics. To start making more advanced stuff like moving doors, pools of water, and funky lighting you'll have to check out some of my other tutorials.

5) Shortcuts

Before I go, you will find these very useful: a selection of short cut keys that will make things much easier and quicker for you ....
I tend to use Ctrl-W and Shift-B the most, but there are some really useful key combos here ...

F1 : Help.
F4 : Actor properties.
F5 : Surface properties.
F6 : Level properties.
F7 : Compile changed scripts.
F8 : Rebuilder.
B : Toggle brush visibility in the current viewport.
H : Toggle actor visibility in the current viewport.
P : Toggle player controls or realtime update of the viewport.
Shift-A : Select all actors.
Shift-B : Select all surfaces belonging to the selected surfaces' brushes.
Shift-C : Select adjacent coplanar polygons.
Shift-D : Duplicate selected actors.
Shift-F : Select adjacent floors.
Shift-G : Select surfaces belonging to the selected surfaces' groups.
Shift-I : Select surfaces with items matching the selected surfaces' items.
Shift-J : Select all adjacent surfaces(flood-fill).
Shift-L : Look ahead in the current viewport (no pitch or roll).
Shift-M : Memorize selected surfaces.
Shift-N : Select none.
Shift-O : Select surfaces from intersection of selected surfaces and memory.
Shift-P : Select all surfaces.
Shift-Q : Reverse the set of selected surfaces.
Shift-R : Recall memorized surface selection.
Shift-T : Select all surfaces which use the current texture.
Shift-U : Select union of selected surfaces and memorized surfaces.
Shift-W : Select adjacent wall surfaces (flood-fill).
Shift-X : Select exclusive or of selected surfaces and memorized surfaces.
Shift-Y : Select adjacent slanted surfaces.
Shift-Z : Select none.
Ctrl-A : Add brush to world.
Ctrl-B : Load brush.
Ctrl-C : Copy.
Ctrl-D : Deintersect brush with world.
Ctrl-E : Save as.
Ctrl-L : Save level.
Ctrl-O : Load level.
Ctrl-P : Play level.
Ctrl-N : Intersect brush with world.
Ctrl-R : Redo.
Ctrl-S : Subtract brush from world.
Ctrl-V : Paste.
Ctrl-W : Duplicate.
Ctrl-X : Cut.
Ctrl-Z : Undo.
Delete : Delete selected actors.
1, 2, 3 : Slow, medium, and fast movement speed.

EZkeel@nikodemus.demon.co.uk