In game development today, there seems to be no shortage of tools vying for our attention. From programming to texturing to modeling, the selection of tools can be dizzying. When Epic announced the inclusion of the modeling tools plugin for the Unreal editor, I thought that this was nothing more than a replacement for the older BSPs already available. A nice addition to be sure, but not a serious tool to be used to create game content. Then Quixel released their videos on the creation of their medieval village demo, and I found a new appreciation for the tools that Epic has generously given us.
The obvious use is for blocking out a scene, and I have mixed feelings about their use for this purpose. Every time that you use a boolean operation on two objects, it creates a third object in the content folder. This can lead to a huge number of useless intermediary objects before you get to the final shape that you want for your block out. Worse, the created objects are all named something cryptic like ‘Boolean_a2b3x092xi3202’ or some such name. The editor appears to take the name of the operation and appends a UUID value to it. You can specify a name other than ‘Boolean’ in the tools, so you could use this to separate the final object you want from the intermediary objects you don’t care about. This leaves you with many unwanted objects with the name ‘Boolean-xxxx’ and one named with the value you provided in the UI. This is the approach that I used, and while it isn’t the most convenient, it does work. Still, this tool is far better that BSPs in my opinion, and is a welcome addition to the editor.
Where this tool really seems to shine is an application that I wouldn’t have thought it useful, but is shown to great effect in Quixel’s videos mentioned above. Using preexisting assets, along with the tools to reshape them, allows for the reuse of assets in a way that would have been much harder otherwise. What I really like about this toolkit, and even BSPs to some extent, is the fact that you are in the game level itself while using the tools. You can shape something to fit the exact position and placement that you need, with the look that you want. This could be done if you are creating all of your levels geometry in a separate DCC, but I have never liked this approach. I want to see what my level or asset looks like in the engine, not in the renderer that is shipped with the DCC. No matter what settings I tweak, I have never gotten MAX, Blender, or Houdini to render my assets the same as Unreal does. There is also the overhead of having to define each material twice; you define it in the DCC of your choice, and you define it again in your engine. We’ve all been there, and there is an element to this that cannot be escaped. It is a necessary evil. But, it is nice that this can be lessened to a degree.
I have recently finished the bamboo hut where the player will go to initiate the start of the level in Capuchin Capers. This will allow the player to explore the island a bit and get familiar with the terrain…or just sightsee if they like. Once they are ready, they will enter the hut and the level will begin. Because of this, the hut will be included in every level and is the only structure in the game. It is likely to receive quite a bit of scrutiny from the player, so it has to match the visual fidelity of the rest of the level as well as having no strange issues with collision or scale. I decided to use the editors modeling tools to block this out. Previously, I would have either used BSPs (if I could talk myself into enduring that experience), or I would use an exported mannequin model as reference for scale. The latter would have been a big mistake.
I wanted a ramp leading up to the entrance to the hut, but the ramp needs to be long enough to clip through the terrain. I don’t know every location where this will be placed yet, so the model needs to account for that placement. But, I also do not want the hut as a whole to take up more space than is absolutely necessary. I was able to make the angle of the ramp steep enough to make it compact-ish, while still being able to actually walk up the ramp. This could have been done with BSPs, but that would have been a painful experience, to be sure. Aside from the ramp, I was able to easily get the overall shape of the hut the way that I wanted it. I had a specific look in mind and it was fairly easy to get to that look with the tools. I was still using the tools like a caveman, due to my experience with BSPs, so I could have refined the hut’s shape far more than I did in-editor. But my block-out was complete, with all the windows where I wanted them and at the correct heights. I exported this block-out to Blender to build the actual geometry for the hut.
I used geometry from preexisting assets in an attempt to maintain some continuity in the materials used. The tree trunks that make up the posts for the hut are palm trees that are actually in the levels. Similar assets were ‘repurposed’ in the same way, such as bamboo. I then used the same technique shown in Quixel’s video on the creation of their houses in their demo. Utilizing a separate UV channel to introduce mud, dirt, and grime to the hut really made all the difference. While most of the geometry used to build out the hut has shared UVs, or tiling textures, the approach Quixel demonstrates allowed me to break up the feeling that the materials are all shared. It gave each piece of geometry the feel of being a separate component in the hut, not just a bunch of copies of the same thing…which, of course, they are. I used Painter to bake out my AO, curvature, thickness and other maps, and then to create the masks needed to create this effect in Unreal.
I could have used Unreal’s modeling tools for much more than I did. They are not just a toy, or a replacement for BSPs, as I originally thought. They are a valuable tool in the toolkit, and one I plan to explore further. Thanks for the read.