Lesson 7

By: Deathbliss

Deathbliss

Going outside... The floor lofter, advanced water, and adding ambient sounds:

Been wanting to get outside? Well I'll tell you all I know and a few tricks I've picked up along the way, but remember this is my first time too on some of this stuff. To start open up the last save of the map you have been working on with me (lesson 6) then build a cube 2000x2000x2000 and texture with something from GENEARTH. SUBTRACT the RED BRUSH and you should have a big grassy expanse. Be sure to click on TEXTURE view in the 3D-VIEW. We'll be adding lights later. Next go up to WINDOW and find FLOOR LOFTER, then open it up - you'll see this: I've re-sized mine so that it fits just under the TOP and SIDE VIEWS. I also suggest finding ZOOM in the menu at the top and then ZOOM OUT 2X. At this point you'll see the same thing above, but smaller. You'll also notice the red line you see at the bottom also makes up the sides. You create terrain by clicking on any of the four little squares on the blue line or the circle. Just RIGHT CLICK and drag but DO NOT GO UNDER THE RED LINE!!! It has been reported this will cause the UnrealED to crash. Also ignore the CELL SIZE and TERRA GRID options as changing these will have no effect. There are a total of 5 LEVELS and you switch between them using the arrows. The RENDER SCALE is defaulted at 256x256 and each increase is by a factor of 256x256 - hence a RENDER SCALE of 2 is 512x512, 3 would be 768x768, 4 is 1048x1048, and so on. For our room we'll need one with a RENDER SCALE of 8, so go ahead and place a 8 in the RENDER SCALE box. Now the effect we want (I have a plan and a suprise here ...) is a hilly and rough piece of terrain. Now lower the two squares on the either end of the blue line to the point that they are still above the red line (the bottom of the box) but also they are still lower than the rest of the VERTICES. Yes, these areas you are manipulating are refereed to as VERTICES. Go through all the views putting those VERTICES any way you like, and when you're done click on the box entitled RENDER there on the FLOOR LOFTER'S menu. The RED BRUSH will become a piece of terrain - here's how mine turned out at first: Head up to BRUSH then ADD and your RED BRUSH will now place the terrain you designed in the level. Go through and center it on all sides and align it with the floor. RIGHT CLICK on the grassy texture you used for your terrain and SELECT/SELECT MATCHING TEXTURES. Go into SURFACE PROPERTIES and under ALIGN, ALIGN FLOOR/CEILING and the stretching goes away. Finally you may wish to select the walls and ceiling and texture with SHANEDAY/DAYSKY8 and under SURFACE PROPERTIES check mark FAKE BACKDROP and UNLIT. Yes, yours hangs out on all sides a bit and there's a weird box in mine. With a close up view on a grid re-sized to 2 it's precisely 3 darker gray squares on all sides if you center it perfectly. So do you desire to look around? Remember the lift in the Pool Room? On the opposite wall there's a nice blank space waiting to be filled. Go ahead and DUPLICATE your TELEPORTERS from the other parts of your level and place one in our outdoor area, and the other in that blank space - right above the lower TELEPORTER in the Pool Room. Make sure the red arrows point INTO the TELEORTER where the character will enter, and OUTSIDE where the character exits if you can. Hence the new TELEPORTER in the Pool Room will point inside itself. The one in our outside area will point - you got it - outside. When designing TELEPORTERS and apparently also PORTALS you must have the RED ARROW pointing the way the character(s) will face when using them if you want the best results. Make sure you reassign these new TELEPORTERS a new name and URL. In mine the upper TELEORTER in the Pool Room is called poolroom2 and it's URL is Out. The one in the outside area is called Out and is pointing to poolroom2. Make sure you have the TELEPORTERS placed above the ground so you can get in and out - use a flatter area if you have one. REBUILD, SAVE and take a look around. Kinda dumb without cliffs huh? Well open up the FLOOR LOFTER again and this time make terrain the same size as before, but this time design the left side buttons on all 5 LEVELS of the FLOOR LOFTER to be a little lower than the right side.

Imagine the left side as what will be the base of the terrain. See we want cliffs - so we can add a suprise, and it seems to me that by keeping the left side higher than the right we can create a realistic set of cliffs. I have NEVER done this before - let's see what happens. I am going to lower both sides some more so we actually have some space - do as you wish but try to keep the left side higher. When you're done RENDER it then ROTATE it in whichever view allows rotation. You want to place the terrain on it's left side. ADD your terrain to each wall. If you are feeling extremely creative you may design a separate piece of terrain for each wall - I'm being lazy. DUPLICATE the lights from your SKYBOX and place then near the roof of our outdoor area - remember you are trying to emulate the sun. I am using only 5 lights and I am texturing the cliffs with MSROCK3. Here is the end result of mine - your results will vary - there is no wrong answer if it looks and "feels" like cliff walls. Of course I moved my TELEPORTER to another location and now it has the effect of having been there forever as it appears to be sinking into the ground. Notice how there is no life other than you in our levels so far? This will change I assure you! Ok, now for the suprise ... We're building a waterfall and a pool for it to go into!!! Yippee!!! Ok, so it's not that great but I bet you've been dying to learn how. First off you need to think about where you want it, for me it'll be opposite my portal as there is a large dip there perfect for this. Usually you place a waterfall as if it's coming out of the rocks somewhere. Wolf advises you make a trench for the waterfall to flow along. Mine will be coming from on top of the rocks. Here are a few choices:

1. Design a trench for the water to flow along with the waterfall sheet sealing off the top.
2. Make an invisible cube that will will be sealed by the waterfall sheet.
3. Make sheets that go far into the cliff walls so there are no leaks. These must be WATER sheets with INVISIBLE check marked.

I went with option #3 and here is the result: See how the sides are completely against the cliff? Now I'm not giving exact sizes here - you have to decide that yourself. Did you notice that when you first added your water sheet that the texture didn't look anything like a waterfall? Well, there is something important you must do to get your waterfall to look good. After you find a texture you like (I'm using DNITRO7) set the assorted values by right click on the surface of your waterfall and going into SURFACE PROPERTIES. Follow the pic below and experiment if you want: The V-PAN option that is checked is so that the waterfall flows. Is it flowing from the ground up? Well the final thing you need to do here in SURFACE PROPERTIES is go to the tab that says ROTATE and find the button that says FLIP V. Now when you click on the little joystick icon you have a somewhat believable waterfall. For the waterfall you'll need a WATERZONEINFO and you'll also need one for the pool.

At this point we have some more work to do, so feel free to REBUILD, SAVE and check it out. I decided I wanted to make everything a little finer so I scaled it down to 0.125. However, I discovered I have to re-apply the stretch and FLIP V after doing so. Looks good to me - how about a pool? Did you know the sheet doesn't have to perfectly fit where it suits? It has to seal where it sits perfectly, but we can take a square sheet and get a pool that's any design we want as long as it seals against the terrain. You know how to do this by now so I'll leave it to you. Just don't go outside the outer box, and if you have edges sticking out where you don't want try lowering the sheet under the terrain. Here's how mine looks: Well I've been struggling with this for a half hour or so - I kept entering the outside area and drowning almost because the water was everywhere. Glad to say it's fixed, and if you have the same problem here's how to get rid of it. If the problem resides in your pool seeming to be higher than the terrain in spots just make another piece of terrain that'll it fit in there and seal it. If you're a perfectionist like me than you'll just re-do the entire ground terrain until you have something useable. If the problem resides in areas of your waterfall (probably the very top more than anything else) that aren't sealed against the cliff just create a sheet to seal the gap. Make it a WATER sheet an make it's aligned on all sides and that it seals on those areas. Hmm, have I ever shown you how to widen, lengthen, or stretch your geometry? Well you use the following buttons:

| The top one (SCALE) re-sizes the scale independent of the grid and all at once. It's very hard to set properly. The bottom one (SNAPSCALE) snaps onto the grid - either along the width or length. Holding the LEFT mouse button while pressing and holding CTRL will re-size the objects width, and the RIGHT mouse button with CTRL re-sizes the objects length.

Using SNAPSCALE I have made all my terrain in our outdoor area slightly smaller so it fits exactly in the box that makes up the borders of our outer area. If you've been having problems you should follow my lead. First center the terrain you are re-sizing so that it's equally hanging over on all sides. With the grid at 2 it'll be 3 darker gray squares as I mentioned earlier. Just shrink it in each direction in the TOP VIEW until it's perfectly aligned with the outer box's borders.

Now for some sounds - get over to the CLASSES BROWSER and look for KEYPOINT in the menu. Click on the - and low and behold AMBIENT SOUND is right at the top. Add the ambient sounds for the waterfall both in the waterfall and under the waterfall in the water (if necessary). I am using AMB OUTSIDE from the SOUND FX BROWSER and have select FALLS2 for my waterfall sound. You just RIGHT CLICK on the little key that represents and ambient sound, open up AMBIENT SOUND PROPERTIES and click on the - next to SOUND. In that list is a box by the words AMBIENT SOUND that currently says "none". You just highlight a sound you want then you click on that word "none" in that box and click on USE. The sound you have chosen will be displayed next to AMBIENT SOUND. At this point I'll leave you to adjust the properties any way you like. I just lowered the pitch to 50 and increased the radius to 200. Once you have everything where you want REBUILD, SAVE and test out the level. Noticed yet how you can swim right up the waterfall? Well there are a few ways to fix that. Some refer to setting the gravity high, I'm referring to Nyleve's Falls again to see how the people that did Unreal did it. Ok, here's what I've picked up in the last few hours of research. Look at the pic below, and set your two zones accordingly. REBUILD, SAVE, and check it out. You'll see that now you can't swim up the water fall and you get pushed backwards if you just sit in the water. This is similar to most waterfalls of this size and I should know because I live by few. The water doesn't look right nor is the waterfall itself perfect but the feel is there. So why did we set these properties this way? Look for the answer at the end of this lesson.

Well I got this done pretty quick - I see we need to incorporate better lighting techniques (I'm sure you agree) and maybe fine tune a few things. We'll place weapons and baddies in the next tutorial, and sometime after that or also in the next lesson we will go over designing our own decorations for our skybox - mainly the mountains since I took the lazy approach. Oh and we'll add some fog to simulate mist at the base of the fall as well - so look for the basics of creating fog soon. If you've been with me from Lesson 1 I thank you for coming back, in your case maybe my approach is what you needed and I'm glad if I was of ANY help. Just trying to give you a place to find the answers you need without wasting time searching for them. Some of the stuff in here I get from various sources on the web, and all those links reside on the main page. I hope to see you with me as we work on Lesson 8 soon! Feel free to e-mail me as always if you need any assistance. Or if you're up to it you might tell me how I'm doing.

Final notes on ZONE VELOCITY:

Ok here is what I know so far. Setting the Z variable will provide either an upward or downward force. So when you want something that pushes you up (a good example is that Quake 2 level on the N64 with the giant fan in the floor of the level) you have to set the Z ZONE VELOCITY to something positive, like 100.000000. However if you wanted a sucking or pushing motion, you have to set a negative value like -100.000000. The Y variable will push you forward or backward with the positive value pushing you forward and the negative value pushing you back. The X variable I believe determines side to side push, so if you wanted to set a fan trap in the wall you'd set an X variable that emulates the sucking motion of the fan. I believe we'll experiment with this some more later. Feel free to put my words to the test on the map we're making - just keep an extra copy of the one with the correct settings.