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Forum > Tutorials
[FULL GUIDE] WoW to UDK
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samgartell:
5. Terrain Nodes, Tilesets, and Painting Landscape
This is my favourite part, mainly because nobody does it the same, everyone paints and shapes Terrain in their own way, it's almost like your own personal style.
To get started, go to the main UDK window, and go to "Tools > New Terrain" in the toolbar, it'll open a menu, and the menu will ask you how many patches you want in X and Y, this will be the size of your map in Unreal Units, just estimate how big you're going to make your scene, and then press Next. (DO NOT OVERDO IT, I REPEAT DO NOT; Any bigger than 1024*1024 is pushing it, so be careful.), press Finish and you'll notice a checkered plane appear in the viewport, typically, I move the centre to the centre of the map, but it's not necessary.
Now you're gonna want to shape it, and paint it, to do this, open the terrain editor, , on the left hand side of the UDK window. The terrain editor is another great tool in UDK, it allows you to paint the heightmap and materials in real time. To get materials for your terrain open Machinima Studio, and go to this filepath in the treeview
And then select a texture you want, you'll preferably need four textures:
- Dirt
- Rock
- Grass
- Grass Detail (Flowers etc.)
I'll be using these:
- tilesetexpansion02grizzlyhillsgh_dirtd
- tilesetexpansion02sholazarbasinsb_rockya
- tilesetexpansion02grizzlyhillsgh_bushya
- tilesetexpansion02grizzlyhillsgh_flowers2
To use them, do exactly as you did with the previous materials, import, make shader (don't use normal maps, terrain can only have 12 texture samples total, so use them wisely), and compile. To get them onto the terrain though, Select your dirt material in the Content Browser, and then go to the terrain editor, , and then just below where it says "Heightmap" right click and press "New Terrain Setup Layer from Material (Auto-Create)" and it will load your texture as a "layer", seeing as it's your first, it'll cover the terrain with it, then do this for the rest of your materials.
*If your Materials are being displayed too big, increase the tessellation.
Now, to painting, select the layer you want to paint, and press the paint tool, and then choose the size of your brush, and then hold ctrl, and right/left click to add/subtract materials. If you have the dirt layer or the heightmap layer select, it will raise and lower the ground, allowing for mountain etc.
Experiment with this a lot, you will eventually develop an idea, and build onto it. You'll eventually make yourself pleasantly surprised, and then you'll stick to that method of painting terrain. Like I said, nobody is the same.
Here's some random squiggles, just for reference to what it should look like.
* If you're getting trippy rainbow material, you've either got an outdated CPU, or are using too many Texture Samples in your materials.
samgartell:
6. Building a Scene
Things should be winding down now, the more complicated things are out of the way for now, and after this, Matinee, Kismet, Particles and Cascade and Lighting are totally optional, and are only used for adding a bit of life to your scene.
To add objects to your scene, simply drag a static mesh from the Content Browser into the viewport and onto the terrain node, there you have it, you're done. That's it. Honestly. You've ported a WoW Model into UDK and used it inside the engine.
You can use the transform tools, , to scale, rotate, and move the objects.
To add more objects, use the processes above, and it should always work. If it doesn't, leave a reply, and I'll try to get back to you on it. If you're not interested in the optional stuff, head to "Building/Compiling Scene" and then you're done. For anybody leaving, thanks for reading, for the rest of you, good luck. :)
samgartell:
7. Dynamic and Static Lighting
For the rest of this tutorial, I'll be using an island I made earlier.
7a) Static Lighting
For the static lighting section, I'll be concentrating on an Iron Dwarf town on the Island, as the static lighting here is more dense than most areas on the island.
First, what is a static light?
A static light is a light which will have it's colour and shadows baked into a lightmap, and therefore, cannot be moved, or edited in real-time with Matinee and Kismet. It is for the most basic lights on your level, but done right, can look incredible.
Now a quick warning, never go overboard with lighting, not only will it take a hell of a long time to compile, but it'll look extremely bad, and honestly, it's not worth risking it.
Right, onto adding a light;
Go to anywhere in your scene, and right click, Add actor, Light (Point). Done.
Now, you can use the transform tools to move, scale, and rotate the light (useful for spotlights, not so much pointlights)
But one thing most tutorials skip is lighting colour, this is extremely important and atmospheric, and totally makes the scene more lively.
As you can see, there are blue lanterns which give off a blue glow, this is done by right clicking your pointlight, going to properties and doing the following
Anddd done.
7b) Dynamic Lights
This is actually an introduction for the Matinee and Kismet section, as what I'll be doing in that will include dynamic lights.
Dynamic lights are movable, editable lights that Matinee and Kismet can use.
To make one, create a pointlight like above, but then right click, and press "Toggle Dynamic Channel"
Then open it's properties, go down to Movement, open it, and set it's Physics to "PHYS_Interpolating"
When an object has interpolating physics it means it will update dynamically, for example, a flickering light will update in real-time. Static lights can't be used to do this.
Extra info: Moving the Sun/Moon
The dominant directional light (The one that was already in the level when you made it) control the colour, location and all settings of the sun/moon and the light the sun/moon gives off, to move the sun/moon, rotate the dominant directional light, to change the colour and brightness, edit the properties like any other light.
samgartell:
8. Kismet and Matinee
This is slightly complicated, but the format of Kismet is very similar to the Material Editor, and many other tools in UDK, so it's best to get used to the environment early on. If you've ever used any animating software what-so-ever, you already know how to use Matinee.
Right, to begin with, we need an objective, for example, a flickering light, as mentioned above.
I'll be using a campfire for my flickering light, I'm using an orange dynamic light.
As you can see, it's lighting up the area around it, but for extra atmosphere a flicker would be nice. So What I'm going to do is open Kismet, , next to the content browser, and you'll be presented with an interface. To begin with, Kismet uses conditions to start actions using variables.
We'll be using a basic condition/event, "Level Loaded" to get this, right click in the grey space of Kismet, New Event > Level Loaded
Once this is done, a node will appear, right click in the greyspace again and press "New matinee" connect either "Beginning of Level" or "Loaded and Visible" of Level Loaded to "Play" on your Matinee.
That's the Kismet done.
Now for the Matinee.
Open Matinee, , next to Kismet's button, and Matinee will open, or if you have multiple Matinee nodes in Kismet, it will ask you which one you want to edit.
When open, go back to the scene, select your dynamic light, and open Matinee again, this is important, do not skip this, or it will not work.
Now inside Matinee, right click where it shows, in this picture, and click "new lighting group"
Call the lighting group whatever you want, and press OK.
For the flickering effect, there are multiple ways to go about it, but I'll be using the Brightness track, to do this, just click the Brightness track in your new group and press the keyframe button, , now we have the first keyframe, each keyframe will hold the brightness value that the dynamic light has at the time of pressing the keyframe button, so open the dynamic lights properties like you did to change it's color, and just above the color picker setting, you'll find the Brightness value.
To make it flicker, do like so, following the order
1. Move time
2. Change brightness
3. Keyframe
Do this a couple of times, trying to be as random as possible with the brightness value and you'll end up with a flickering light.
Press loop section, to check it's working, if it's not, review the steps in this tutorial, and make sure you followed exactly.
samgartell:
9. Building and Compiling the Scene
If you're finished with your scene, firstly, save it. Always save, you can never save your work too much. UDK is still in Beta, and therefore crashes a lot if you're not careful or don't know what you're doing.
And now, you'll want to build your geometry, lighting, and paths. If you're making a scene for a short film, or a picture, building lighting is a necessity, it looks better, and it's more resource efficient.
To do this, just press Build All (Marked green), , and wait for it to complete.
Depending on your computer, this can take a while.
Once that's done, open your UDK folder, go into Binaries, and find UnrealFrontend.exe, and then run it.
When it's open, you'll want to make a profile for your "game" for convenience, and possible distribution, to do so, right click an existing profile (That isn't an iOS Profile) and choose "Clone profile" then right click again and Rename it. To get your map to load natively, first add it to the "Maps to Cook" list, and then remove any existing maps.
Now tick Override Default, and select your map again from the dropdown list.
Then press cook, and you're done.
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