4 Steps to Start Whiteboxing in Unreal Engine

hi there if you're working with unreal engine and you need a little bit of help i'm here and just for your information i'll be um drinking out of this this mug that my girlfriend made me actually i'm connor i'm making a game called on company time and today i want to show you how i have started white boxing for my game white boxing if you're not sure what the term means it is blocking out the level or a certain section in your game and developers do this that they can see how their game is going to work once they walk through it and everything and test it out and it's just to kind of get a basic idea of how everything is designed from architecture to furniture to human models actually this is really important especially as someone like me who's on my first run making games so that you don't end up making a terrible level now you might have heard the term white boxing um it's also referred to as gray boxing blocking out um it's pretty much just all of those things used all the time i'm going to be showing you a four step process of how to get started number one you have to know what you're making you have to get on a program i did adobe illustrator and i just created a general layout of my floor plan and your game or project could vary but for me i had to make a floor plan because i'm doing kind of an office type of game when doing this you want to think about proportion and you know the flow of a certain environment where you want things to be and i typically go through a name everything i try to have thicker lines be on you know more outside walls and thinner lines represent thin walls um the bounds of objects and things like that the important thing about this is creating the backbone of the whole structure of your white boxing second you're going to want to import this image into unreal now i struggle with this for probably 30 minutes okay i stuff like this can be hard so you want to place a plane on the screen really quick i will show you how you can do this [Music] [Music] now that your floor plan or layout or image is placed you can start building your level now there's a few different ways you can do this but what i've been doing on my game is using vsp brushes and vsp brushes and these are good because you can easily manipulate them and convert them later into static meshes which you can do your textures on colors you can make things look like walls or make things look like desks and it's a really good workflow you'll find those under the geometry tab and well not the basic one all right and step four is knowing the basics so right off the bat i want to give you guys some basic measurements of things that you will probably be using a lot in your game now a unit is one centimeter in unreal now just really quickly to go over the standard sizes of doors and walls walls i would start around 300 units or 300 centimeters tall and about 20 centimeters thick and what this is going to do is give you a basic place to start i actually ended up making my walls quite a bit taller than this in my game but this is all for you to adjust based on your liking and then with doors you want to start around 220 centimeters tall and about 120 to 140 centimeters or units wide so you can actually walk through it and your player in unreal starts if you do the um first person or third person um your character should start around the size of 180 centimeters tall and 60 by 60. so a 60 by 60 square that's 180 centimeters tall or units tall and then you're wondering how to make all those cool shapes um like here i have a desk and you might think well how do i how do i do that connor so you want to mess with the additive and subtractive qualities of these pre vsp brushes this is one of the main advantages is you can um you know the regular blocks will be additive but then subtractive will actually take away from the vsp brush that it's interacting with so you can start hollowing things out and you know you can place spheres cones all sorts of different shapes and you can kind of cut and paste them together and it's it's really it makes things a lot easier just getting things started really rough and fast and then if you're doing a project like mine you'll be creating something like a lot of cubicles and what you have to do for that is build all the walls build the desk the computer keyboard mouse and well it'd be hard to do all this and select in the world outliner every time so what you want to do after you create something and it seems good enough for you to start slinging around is you want to select all the objects in world outliner or all the actors and then you want to group those and this will help you just move it around without all these loose parts being able to move out of place and then after that you just do control w on the keyboard and this will duplicate your group and so if you need to do something over and over again these are basic basic shapes they will be changed later if you want to duplicate something over and over you can just do this drag it around rotate things a little bit make it look natural so today we went over how to start white boxing your game or project in unreal engine after doing this you can play with where your players start goes uh work on ceilings and floors and really just polish it off so you can start testing the layout of your level or section in the game if you like this video please give it a thumbs up so you can help grow my channel and let more people like you learn how to do stuff in unreal and as i said i'm actually making my first game and on my channel you can look at some vlogs i've done and in the future i'll be publishing more content just kind of updating people on my game and you can have a bird's-eye view on my journey and mistakes that i've made and learn from and also make sure to subscribe if you like this content and me and i will see you next time [Music] [Music]

Channel: Connor Woog

Views: 259

Keywords: game development, game dev, devlog, indie game, indie game dev, how to make a video game, unreal engine game dev, unreal tutorial, unreal engine 4 tutorial, on company time, how to make games with unreal, making money with game dev, indie game unreal engine, is game dev worth it, how to make indie games, game dev for beginners, how to use unreal engine, what is whiteboxing, layout map for game, start project in unreal, unreal engine 4, level design, level design in unreal

Id: CGxndb86yWY

Length: 7min 39sec (459 seconds)

Published: Sat Aug 21 2021