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Tips & Tricks

 
UnrealED Tips and Tricks
 Overview
The following is a list of the most useful tips and tricks to help speed your workflow when working in UnrealED(Unreal Tournament 3).  Some of these can also be found in the Tip for the Day  in UnrealED, but if your like me, you probably turn those dialogs off the first time you see it.  Now I'm not going to list every single tip from the tip of the day dialog, but I will post some of the ones that I found to be the most useful.  I will also post some of my own tips and tricks that I've discovered on my own.  If anyone has any other sugestions, please contact me and I'll post your tip on here as well. 
 
Tip of the Day (UnrealED for UT3)

  • What package is this asset in? Right click on an actor such as a mesh and select "Sync Generic Browser" to see that asset in the Generic Browser window. (Personal Note: This can be very useful if you are referencing another map and need to know what package a particular mesh is in)
  • Got a floating object you want on the ground? Select it and press the "end" key to drop that object to the surface beneath it.
  • Quickly add and subtract the builder brush from your level's BSP by using "Ctrl+A" and "Ctrl+S". (Personal Note: These are two keyboard shortcuts that you need to know.  These are some of the most important keyboard shortcuts you could learn.  USE THEM! They will increase your workflow)
  • Making rows of duplicate objects? Select an actor and hold "Alt" before dragging the object to modify the object and leave a duplicate behind (release Alt between clones). (Personal Note: This is quite possibly the most useful tip that I can recommend.  I was doing it the hard way until I read this tip one day.  Saved me a TON of time. You can also hold Shift at the same time to lock the camera to the object you are duplicating to also save some time.)
  • Want to select a brush itself, and not just the surface? Hold "Ctrl+Shift" when you click the brush's surface. (Personal Note:  This is another tip that I wished I would have known about months ago.  This will save you a ton of time once your level has hundreds of brushes in it.
  • Need a quick measurement? Just drag with your middle mouse button in a viewport to pull up the in-editor ruler.
  • Wish your builder brush or volume was a solid instead of wireframe?  The red icon in the top tool paned labeled "Toggle Brush Polys" will display the selected geometry filled with translucent polygons, allowing you better visualization of where your volume exists in the gamespace. (Personal Note: This is another useful tip.  This can be very handy when your working with blocking volumes.  With this on you can quickly see if a brush is in or outside of your blocking volume.)
  • Need to place lots of a specific actor type? In the "Actor Classes" browser, select an object such as "PathNode". Now hold the "A" key while clicking on surfaces in your preview window, this will drop an actor of the selected type with every mouse click. (Personal Note:  I REALLY wish I would have known about this one along time ago.  This would have saved me a ton of time when laying out pathnodes the first time.)
  • Box select objects by holding Ctrl+Shift when you left-drag your mouse, do the same with the right mouse button to box deselect and area.(Personal Note:  I use this quite a bit to make things not so cluttered.  I'll box select the section of the map I'm working on and hide non selected actors so I'm not seeing so many meshes and building brushes.)

 
Personal Tips

  •   Make sure that you are using the grid!  This is one of the most important things you could do when building your level.  You should try to make sure everything in your level aligns to the major grid lines.  This will help you in multiple ways.  It can even make texture work much quicker as texture placement on the BSP uses the grid as well.  If your room is based on major grid lines, your texture should line up perfect most of the time when placeing it the first time.  This can save you a ton of time and will also make your level look much cleaner, and easier to work on.
  • When working with static mehses, don't hesitate to utilize them in more creative ways.  Just because a static mesh is catagorized under a wall, window_frame, or support does not mean you can't use it for something else.  Take a look at the levels that shipped with the game for some great examples of this.  Look at the large motors in DM-Arsenal, or the large pumps in DM-Deck.  Most are made with multiple meshes placed together in interesting ways to build much more complex structures.  Don't worry if multiple static meshes are intersecting with each other.  Now I'm not saying you should just take a bunch of meshes and stack them on top of each other.  You will still have to make it look as though it belongs in the level.  If you're trying to make a large machine for instance, make sure to also think how an object like that would work in the real world.  If your machine is attached to the wall, you should think about how it would be held there if in real life.  In reality you would need large supports to keep it secured to the wall.  Small details like this can make a huge difference to your level design overall.