Building on the grid and appropriate scaling

[Maverick1868]

I started to build out the level on a 45º so I could get some of those angles and it seems okay so far but I might twist the whole thing so that it lines up with the right/left and front/back views better. I’m a little worried about how these ceiling pieces are going to line up but that’s a tomorrow problem. It seems odd that the sizes of something as basic as floors or wall pieces would change depending on the floor. Also I seem to read different advice in different places on the subjects of building modular levels.

• Always avoid scaling pieces
• Scaling by a small percentage is fine
• We’re going to scale this statue up 10x on the XYZ
• It’s very important to build on the largest grid possible
• If your piece fits better drop the grid down some
• Grid? Just turn it off and we’ll nudge this mesh right in there

What’s with this? Maybe someone can offer some principals to follow or reasoning for this? Should I worry about twisting the whole level because it would misalign “The Grid”?

Additionally, I’m going to need some nice cavern pieces but I’m not seeing any free ones on the marketplace or quixel bridge. Does anyone have any suggestions of kits or sources they’ve used?

[Maverick1868]

Flying around it made me feel like the main floor was too big in the sketch so I made it more of a square for the main chamber as you can see above. Angled on the 45º it wasn’t automatically clearer what was going on in the right or front orthographic and I primarily work in perspective anyway so I left it angled. At least the staircases are straight. Mostly.

Building this out took me to nearly 1k actors over many hours. I used the grid a lot set primarily at 100 and I hotkeyed the [ ] to my mouse to drop it when I needed. I also hotkeyed ctrl+~ to toggle local or global as needed but the biggest help working in unlit came from turning the edges on.

Because my design was radial I got a lot of mileage out of that center ceiling tile because it has a center pivot. I could copy a whole chamber, select that, pivot it, and then paste the copied pieces back in. From the start, many of my diagonal rooms needed a 1.4 XY scale for walls. I used transform and rotate snap almost always but scale snapping never did much for me. I scaled things and worked off the grid without remorse when nessesary so we’ll see what trouble that gets me in. I also dabbled with the new modeling tools to cut floors on the diagonal and make those partial pillars. The cave and ruins pieces came free from the marketplace. Soul Cave and Infinity Blade respectively. Thanks to Mechanought on the GDDiscord for the recomendation.

Now I need lighting…

[Maverick1868]

I did end up lighting this thing but given the limits of my video card, I had to use medium editor settings. I am nonetheless pretty happy with how it’s coming along. I would say in the long run, operating large and light on details was best at first. The places where I needed walls to match up with diagonal floor pieces got the 1.4 scale. As I started to get a better feel for what the level was going to be, I could break the basic structure down to open up important sight lines and give things a more distinct feel. These actions were often accomplished at lower grid levels. When adding small details to cover up seams these were more often off the grid entirely.

CryptRaider1stDraft

I’m open to suggestions but this approach worked out pretty well for me. I got stuck on the programming portion of the project, mostly in the syntax of pointers and references but I really want the puzzle aspect to come into play because guiding that is why the level is the shape it is at all. I took a quick detour over to the C++ fundamentals course to gain more logical comfort with that rather than just replay these videos. I’m glad I did, but I should get back to finishing this project soon. I’m happy to just share but feedback also is welcome.