Tutorial #5: Doors (click to download .UNR) | Author: Crymson | Last Updated: May 25th

Unreal Tutorial #5 Crymson’s Guide to Gooder Unreal Door/Lift Making (The following guide is a tutorial on making doors; however, a similar process is used for making elevators/lifts: only the mover brush and direction changes…) (click here to view full screen)

Okay, so you have your nice little level but you want to make a door. This is how you do it.

First thing first, we need to design our door. There’s nothing special about this, you can choose any style you want. For this level I’m just going to use a thin rectangular slice for the door:

(click here to view full screen)

To make this door I just created a thin slice with my brush, selected my texture, and added it to the level.

Now we need to make it move. To make a mover that looks the same as our door we need to intersect it with a large, off-level bounding box. The door we just created is nothing but a template, and will be discarded in the final version. To make the bounding box you need to use cube properties. If you don’t, your final mover will have ghost zones (It looks like its there, but when you touch it you fall/pass through). Why would it do this? I’m not sure, but it has to do with scaling. If you make your huge bounding box by scaling then your eventual mover door will be scaled by the same proportions (as your huge bounding box); and where there’s scaling on a mover, there’s ghost zones. All of that being said, lets get back to making the bounding box. Make sure your cube brush has reset all transforms (use right-click -> reset -> reset scaling) before making the bounding box. If not, some scaling transforms can sneak into your final bounding box (even though you used cube properties to define its size). Usually a cube of 1000/1000/1000 is sufficient, but if you have a huge door you can easily make the cube bigger. Move this cube brush off to the sides and subtract it. You should have something like this going on in your level:

(click here to view full screen)

Now, make your door template into a brush (use right-click -> copy to polygons -> to brush) and place the brush in the bounding box. Add the brush and delete the original door template. When you do this you need to reapply textures and other effects. (You don’t have to do it the way I did it, you can make the door in the middle of the bounding box straight off, but I prefer making it in the level first so I can see how it fits/looks.) Now, select the huge bounding box and make a brush out of it (use right-click -> copy to polygons -> to brush). Then, click on the intersection button on your toolbar (far right, third down). The resulting red outline is your mover brush. Move it to any part in a level where you want a door and hit the add-mover button (far right, sixth down). For this level we’ll just move it to where the door was and stamp it. It should look something like this:

(click here to view full screen)

There’s your door mover.

Making it move is the easy part. Select keyFrame 1 (right click -> mover keyframe -> key 1), move it to where you want to go, then select keyFrame 0. It’s done: compile and run. See Unreal/Help/ReadMe.txt for more info on setting different triggers up.

Now, the beauty of this method is that it doesn’t matter how you created your door. You can skew, rotate, and scale to your hearts content. Just as long as you make your mover brush by intersecting with the non-scaled, huge bounding box.

Happy Editing…

crymson (hku@slip.net)