Tutorial #2: Basic Part 2 | Author: Dr. SiN | Last Updated: May 24th

Unreal Tutorial #2 The Basics Part 2 Actors and Brushes and Classes oh My: Ok, after doing the first tutorial and sitting in #unrealed for a day, I’ve noticed that most people working with UnrealED are stuck in a Quake/Quake 2 editing mindset. You need to get out of that mindset and it will make editing in Unreal harder.

In Quake/Quake 2 editing, you laid out brushes to form levels. Everything you created (with the exception of monsters and weapons) were built out of multiple brushes laid against each other. A wall was a brush.. a room was at least 4 brushes.

Unreal is totally different. Throw away any 3D editing knowledge you have. A brush in UnrealED is VERY different from a brush in Quake. Let’s take a quick look at UnrealED’s terminology!

The World: When you first start a new level, you are presented with a huge solid block of matter. This is your world. Anything you do, be it create a room, place a monster, whatever.. is done in the world. I like to think of the world as a huge block of clay that you can manipulate.

Your Brush: Notice I didn’t say "A brush" or "your brushes". In Unreal there is ONLY ONE brush. Think of the brush as your cookie cutter that you will use to remove clay (or in some cases put clay back in) to your world. Now it’s important to realize that your brush does not exist in the world. It is simply a template you will use to build things. The brush can take on many forms from a cube to a sphere and through vertex manipulation much more is possible. HOWEVER.. your brush will always be (at least as far as we have found out) a simple geometric shape. Don’t expect to build a custom brush of a cube with a sphere on top.

Actors: I know most of you are use to hearing the word Actor associated with creatures and things inside the game (like weapons). In Unreal, anything that exists in the world is an actor. This includes walls, floors, monsters, lights, EVERYTHING.

HOW DO I:

Ok.. let’s get in to a few how do I do this sections. The information here is the best I know of! If you know a better way to do one of these procedures.. please let me know…

HOW DO I COPY A ROOM.

One of the most asked questions of the day was how do you make a copy of a room you created. Copying rooms in UnrealED is preaty simple. You just select all of the actors that make up the room and hit CTRL-W (the hotkey for duplicate). Let’s use the sample level from the first tutorial.

Load up the level by pressing CTRL-O and selecting TUTORIAL1.UNR. You should now be looking at the level you created in the last tutorial. We want to make a copy of the main room (the one without the slope) and the hallway.

So we pick any of the 2D views (I’ll chose the side view). Now we don’t want the brush confusing us so click on MOVE, then click on the 2D view you want to work in, then press B! You should notice the bush is now no longer to be seen. You can bring the brush back by press B again, but for now let’s leave it off. Notice however that the brush is only hidden in your current view.

Ok, so we have hid the brush and now it’s time to select the rooms. We will do the hallway first so find a wall/ceiling/floor (I’ll call these linedefs from here on out) and click on it while holding down CTRL. The room should turn yellow (which means it’s selected).

Now go to the main room and do the same thing (click on a linedef while holding CTRL). Your whole room and hallway combination should be highlighted. If you have any lights or starts in these room click on them as well. You must select every actor you wish to copy. Now, I think you can use the Select all Inside icon to speed this up, but I haven’t figured it out yet.

Once everything is select it’s time to copy.. Press CTRL-W and UnrealED will make a duplcate of the geometry and place is slightly offset of your original room. Now position it on the other side of second room (the one with the ramp). To do this.. hold down CTRL and either mouse button, then move it in to place. Press F8 to rebuild and now you have 2 rooms that are exact duplicates of each other.

HOW DO I ROTATE A ROOM.

Ok.. now let’s hook that hallway up with the second room. But wait… the hallway is on the wrong side. Don’t sweat it.. we will just rotate the rooms to fit properly. Once again, select all of the actors you wish to rotate. Click on the Rotate Brush icon with the room selected. Now rotate the brush until it faces to opposite direction (with the hall touching room 2).

A note about rotation: As you can see.. MAJOR skewing occures when rotating. If anyone figures out how to fix that.. please EMAIL me right away.

HOW DO I SCALE SOMETHING IN ONLY 1 DIRECTION

This is called constrained scaling. In UnrealED you accomplish this by locking down a vertex in the direction you do not want to move. The best way to show this is to create a column. Click on Use Tube Brush (if you don’t see the brush in one of your windows.. remember to click on the window and press B to make it appear). Move the brush so it’s in the second room and size it’s width to be column like in width. Make sure it is sitting flush against the floor.

Our next step is to pull the column up to the ceiling. To do this, we are going to do a constrained scale. First step, is to lock one end of the brush (in this case.. the end against the floor). Select the brush and then hold ALT while clicking on any of the vertexes on the floor. This will put the little X over the vertex (like we saw in vertex manipulation). That face of the actor is now locked in place and will not scale. Click on the Constrained Scale icon and scale the column to the ceiling.

Before we go any further, let’s unlock the brush. Hold down ALT and click on the vertex in the very center of the brush. This will unlock it. (if you tried to scale it right now, it would scale at both ends). Finally.. click on Add brush to World to make the brush an actor. Press F8 to rebuild.

HOW DO I DELETE AN ACTOR

God that pillar is ugly.. let’s delete it. To delete an actor from the world.. pick a view and press B to hide the brush. Now choose the actor you want to delete (in this case.. click on a linedef that makes up the pillar). It should highlight. Now press DEL on your keyboard and answer poof.. gone (of course.. you might have to press F8 to rebuild before the 3D display will update). Remember.. press B to bring your brush back.

SOME OTHER USEFULL THINGS

I just want to take a second and go over some other useful "quirks" and features of the editor. I’ll be breif..

1) The editor stores different window layouts for each map so you can set it up to what’s best for you.

2) If you press P in a view... that view will automatically update when you change something in another view. Pressing it again turns this feature off. Unfortunately you must do it manually for each window and it doesn’t even give you a message to what it’s done.

CONTACTING ME:

If you need more help or have some ideas, information, etc, you can reach me at mrsin@creativecarnage.com. I can also be found on #UnrealED on EFNET irc.

CREDITS:

There are a bunch of us working on figuring everything out. Some of this information was discovered by the many people on #unrealED including MegaHertz, Freakscne and Orion.

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