Introduction to Unreal Engine 3: Creating Your own Level in Unreal

Tournament 3

The Unreal Engine is included with all of EPICs games which includes the
unreal series and the Gears of War series. This purpose of this article is to
introduce you to the Unreal 3 Engine and to get you started in creating your
own levels.

About the Unreal Engine

The Unreal Engine is a fantastic piece of software that is bundled into most of
the games created by the company EPIC. It is basically the toolset that the
company uses to produce the games they are currently selling. The unique
thing about the Unreal Engine is that you can use it to create an entirely
different game. The Unreal Engine has been used to create several games
that you may be familiar with such as: Deus Ex, Brothers in Arms, Lineage 2,
Tom Clancy Rainbow 6 and Splinter Cell series, Vanguard, BioShock, Mass
Effect and many more. So as you can see you are able to use the Engine to
create anything from a FPS to an MMORPG or simply a new level for the game
itself.

Level Design

Before you even open the Unreal Tournament 3 Level Editor it is a good idea
of have a general idea of what you want your level to look like. How many
rooms do you want to be in your level? What type of theme do you want to
use? It is going to be an indoor level, an outdoor level or a combination of the
two? Are you going to allow vehicles in your level? How many players should
the level be able to hold?

A good tip is to buy you some graphing paper and draw up a rough sketch of
all this info. Draw squares for rooms and place symbols inside the room for
the items or vehicles you think should be placed there. This will make
designing your level go a lot faster and a lot smoother.

Getting Started
Once you have your basic level design thought out you should now start up
the level editor. Starting up the level editor can take anywhere from a few
seconds to a few minutes depending on the type of computer you are using.

When the editor loads you are presented with 4, rather large, windows that
are called viewports. These viewports are what you are going to be using to
navigate through your level in design mode. The viewports consist of a
perspective view (or a 3d view), a top down view, a side view and a front
view. While it is totally acceptable to only use one of these views, it is a good
idea to get into the practice of using all of the viewports to help you place
everything in your level on a more accurate level. You can tell which viewport
is which by taking a look at the icons above each viewport. They are labeled
P, T, F, and S which stands for each type of the respective viewport. So, a
viewport with the icon P depressed means that it is the perspective viewport.

Navigation

Go ahead and left click in the perspective view port. Before you start making
your level you need to be able to move around inside the viewport. Moving
around is done by using the mouse buttons and moving your mouse. If you
hold the left mouse button down and drag your mouse around you are able to
move in a 360 degree rotation and can move forwards and backwards.
Holding both mouse buttons at the same allows you to move up, down, left
and right. Holding down the right mouse button only allows you to pitch the
view at any angle. You should practice moving around the perspective
viewport until you get the hang of it.

Moving around in the other viewports is really simple. You can hold the left
mouse button and drag your mouse or you can use your scroll wheel to zoom
in and out. If you use any of the other movements you will mess up the
viewport, however, it can be easily fixed by clicking on the icons above the
viewport.
Our First Room

Now that we have the basics of movement down, we can start building our
level. The first thing we need to do is create a new level. Click file > New. A
small window will pop-up asking you what type of level you want to make,
additive or subtractive.

Since our level will be small and indoors we are going to use a subtractive
level. Using your perspective viewport, move your view around until you see
a red wireframe box. This is called a brush, which will determine the size of
the room and its placement. Its default size and placement will we fine for
now.

To the left of the viewports you will see a toolbar with a few icons. For now
only concern yourself with the CSG: Subtract button. Go ahead and click on it
once.

This carves out our first room which is depicted by a checkerboard type
texture.
Adding Textures

The default texture for our room is a bit bland and simply won’t do. In order
to change the texture of the walls, floors and ceilings we must first start by
selecting them. In your perspective view port, navigate to the center of the
room. Then select any one of the walls, it should turn a light blue color. Once
selected, right click on the wall and click Select Surfaces and then Adjacent
Walls. Doing this will select all walls inside that room.

On the top toolbar click the generic browser button to open the generic
browser (if it isn’t already opened). This window in itself has a lot of info that
we will not get into right now. We are mainly concerned with just browsing
the textures.

From the file menu go ahead and click File, Open. This will bring up an Open
Package dialog. We first need to navigate to where all of the textures are.
You can find all the available textures by navigating to C:\Program
Files\Unreal Tournament 3\UTGame\CookedPC\Environments. From this
window you can see a bunch of files with the .upk extension. For now, all we
are concerned with is adding some floor, wall and ceiling textures to our
generic browser. Holding ctrl on your keyboard, click ASC_Door.upk,
ASC_Floor2.upk, ASC_Floor.upk, ASC_Walls2.upk, ASC_Walls.upk and
ASC_Walls_Stone.upk and then click open.
In order to get a better idea of what all these textures look like, click the
plane primitive icon in the generic browser.

Browse through all the different textures and click on one that you think looks
good. If you take a look at your perspective viewport you will see that it
applied the texture to your walls. Move the generic browser to the side so you
can see both your perspective viewport and the generic browser. Changing
the texture on the floor and ceiling is the same process. Click the floor until it
gets highlighted in the light blue color, then navigate your generic browser
for a floor texture and viola, you have a textured room!

Adding another room

Left click once anywhere in the side viewport. Click the red box and a
movement gizmo will appear. Click, hold and drag the red arrow to the left or
right. Make sure that it is far enough away from the room we just created to
allow space for a hallway.

Once again, click the CSG: Subtract button to the left. This will create a
second room with the last texture you used from creating the first room.
Repeat the process above to add the textures to the room.

Adding the hallway

In order to create a realistic hallway we need to resize our brush. In order to

do this, right click on the cube icon to the left. This will pop up the brush
builder window. Click on the X, Y and Z properties and set them to the
following (32, 128,128).
Now you need to line up the brush to fit in between the two rooms. If you are
unable to line those up perfectly change your grid settings to 1. The grid
settings can be found on the bottom right corner of the editor. You may need
to zoom in quite a bit to ensure that the lines meet up exactly.

Once you have done this and lined them up perfectly in the side viewport, we
need to bring the hallway down to the ground level. We do this by using the
front viewport, so left click once in the front viewport. Click the smaller box
and use the blue arrow on the gizmo and move the box down to match the
picture below.

Once this is done you can click the CSG: Subtract icon again which adds the
hallway in between the two rooms.

In the next tutorial we are going to place lights, align our textures, add a few
weapons and a player start so we can actually see our level inside the game.