Build levels FAST with UE5's new Cube Grid tool

welcome back everyone today we are going to be talking about the new cube grid tool in unreal engine 5. cubecrid is a tool that lets us quickly block out levels or build some basic static meshes out of cubes you can find the tool over in the modeling mode which you can get to by clicking in the drop down on the top left or by just pressing shift and five then if you look under the poly model section of the modeling tools you can click cube grid when we activate cube grid we get this giant mesh and let's look at what all we can do here so we can drag and create a selection which is basically just giving us a plane from which we are going to do push and pull operations those are the main two verbs we're going to be using throughout when we pull we create cubes for the plane that we're currently on and when we push we destroy those we can change our selection which allows us to do things like either grow a section out of another mesh or if we want to we can also punch a hole by just pushing you can push and pull using q and e as the default hotkeys in addition to pushing and pulling we can slide our current selection forward and back the hotkeys for that are shift e and shift q when we do a slide operation we move our selection without actually creating or destroying any mesh so from that new location we can then do a pull operation or if we want to we can slide back and then do a push operation to destroy some mesh in the middle another cool thing that we can do is we can activate corner mode and in corner mode we get four vertices around our current selection and we can manipulate those vertices with push and pull operations so i can push a single vert here to create this weird deformed shape or if i select both i can build a little ramp you can activate or deactivate corner mode with the z hotkey what else so we have flip what flip is useful for is actually let me get a different example here right now pulling causes me to go up but if i flip by pressing t or clicking the flip button pulling will go downward so basically it just inverts whether you're pushing or pulling so if i flip again now i can pull outward cool you can see all the hotkeys documented here so as i mentioned before we have z for corner mode we can push and pull with e and q ah we can resize the grid so let's say i want to work on like something larger or uh or something smaller to do some detail work i can change this power of two either by sliding or by hitting ctrl q and ctrl e and that will allow me to make a selection with a finer or chunkier granularity based on my needs here so if i wanted to punch like a tiny hole all the way through and then a little hard to see so let's say i want to make a big hole to the start here and then i want to get a finer granularity i'm pressing ctrl q right now to get a smaller grid and i can continue to punch through my hole make it much much smaller there's no light down here so it's difficult to see keep going keep going keep going keep going we're gonna punch that hole there we go okay in addition to changing the size of our grid we can slide our selection by doing a middle mouse drag i'm going to reset my power two back to five so this is pretty straightforward it kind of does what you expect if you hold the middle mouse you can move the selection without resizing it this is useful if like let's say i accidentally miss mess up my selection here and get some open air i can just pull it over with the middle mouse button we also have a grid gizmo which can be hidden or shown with the r hotkey when i press that you'll see this gizmo comes up and i'll show another hotkey real quick because i don't actually want to work over there if i control click i can move the gizmo so this is useful because it allows me to again do that same sliding operation but it also allows me to change the rotation of my grid so let's say i want to shoot out in a like 45 degree angle i can easily do that using the gizmo let's see what else is there ah when we are dragging the gizmo around by default it's just free floating if i hold down i believe it's control yes if i hold down control while dragging and this is maybe difficult to see in the recording it will snap to the objects around me rather than be totally free form all right so that is the very very basics let's uh let's talk about some practical examples so i am going to cancel out of here and this entire cube grid output is one static mesh and if you look over here in the details pane for the kubrick tool output you can see it actually generated a new static mesh oops that's not what i meant to do and put it in my content browser here in this generated folder and this is a super useful property because that means if i want to model something and then reuse it i can very easily do so just like i would with any other static mesh so let's look at a real world example i want to model a little bridge component that i can just staple together so we're going to create like a little base segment here i am going to get a little bit of a finer selection i think maybe like this yeah i think that's good you can hold shift here as well to also just select all the cells in between and i'm going to go ahead and slide up three levels and then make a little hand rail here that looks good i think then let's make this a little bit larger again i think maybe like right here kind of on the seam i'm gonna come back one and slide that there i'm gonna i'm gonna put little support posts here and i do wanna make sure those touch so yeah like right there now let's do that same thing right here do another more and here as well then just like this i think to make it repeat on either side so i'll also need one here yeah that looks pretty good right okay and for the purposes of this example i'm just gonna do the one side but let's uh let's do that for now so i have now created a new static mesh and i can use the standard unreal controls like alt and drag to make a copy of it then i can just snap them together so if i wanted to like build a road or a bridge or something with this little rail it's very easy to do and i've i've modeled this completely and since this is all a static mesh i can now go and actually reopen cube grid mode and let's say i wanted to make that rail on the other side i can very easily do the exact same thing here on just one instance of it and this is actually when i save it i'm going to update all of them because they're using the same static mesh so i'm not gonna worry too much here about getting it perfect but i'm gonna basically do what we did before i think i need yeah yeah i just wanna you know make it make it look good it doesn't need to be perfect but i do want it to look good so we're just gonna put these little posts in and there we go and so right now i've only updated this one but as soon as i hit complete the other instances of this static mesh are also gonna update just like so and so let's say i don't want that let's say i want one segment to be different like let's say i want to put like a little art here i can easily go here i can duplicate the static mesh make a copy of it and then i can say use what i've got selected in the content browser and now i'm manipulating a different static mesh from those other two instances so if i wanted to like put i don't know like let's just say like a little uh little thing here i don't know what it is it doesn't matter but like a little divider there i'm not going to update the other two because this is a separate static mesh so very easy way to create some basic static meshes but the thing i think is potentially more cool than that is the level block out potential so uh this third-person template comes with with a bunch of stuff that like we don't care about let's let's just uh delete all the playground or delete all these cubes i don't care about the text render actor uh i don't need whatever all this stuff is but i still have my players start and i still have my lighting so that's fine we're gonna start by just making a big floor and i'm gonna raise my power of two back up to five here turn my gizmo off oops i'm at that's seven there five is what i want so like we're just going to make a floor great we got a floor uh i want to make sure that my player start position is above the floor so we're just gonna pop him up and press the end key to drop him onto the floor we're gonna make sure that we spawn we spawn great so let's make a little building here and uh make like maybe like just a basic little jungle gym or something for our guy to work his way through so to do that i'm gonna go one two three four five six seven eight nine ten let's see what this looks like here uh i have the sky sphere selected and i was trying to edit the sky sphere that's why i get that error a little bit fiddly still uh you have to clear your selection to create a new static mesh which is maybe not the most intuitive thing all right so there we go i think that's ten by ten one two three four five one two three four five five and one two three four five perfect all right so we've got a ten by ten right now let's see what that looks like in relation to our little guy uh i don't see it in my world why not was i just looking the wrong way there it is i don't know what happened there i confused myself it's fine uh i think that's not big enough so we're gonna go back into the modeling mode here i'm gonna just make it 10 units longer great let's also uh expand it out this direction by 10 units 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10. great now we have a much bigger building and while we're at it let's go and make it a little taller we could use a different uh material here to make this pattern a little cleaner in fact let me change that after i make this a little bit bigger that looks pretty good i think um right now we are using just the default world mid grid material there is a i think it's material instance proc grid this is an engine material so if you don't see this you might have to come to this little gear and click show engine content once you do that you can select that and this material is actually smart enough to uh figure out based on world position what it should draw so i think that's a nice little tool for when we're just generating all of these different meshes great so we we have a giant box um our floor is kind of like it's not centered i'm not going to worry too much about that but i am going to position it here a little bit better i think let's put it at 500 1000 and i assume we are touching the ground yeah we are cool and we are going to take our player start here and drag him out and which way is he facing right now he is facing towards the end of the world so let's spin him 90 degrees all right so now we have a basic building here and i think what we're gonna do with this building is we are gonna cut out the middle and we are going to make some doors and do some stuff here so let's cut all this out so that we get some nice light coming through and i'm not cutting through the floor right now because the floor is a separate static mesh so i don't have to worry about that all right we'll save that go back into edit mode here and i'm gonna make a door probably like a three by three door i think we'll do it something like that yeah all right so now we are in our building here i think i want to have like an exit door maybe like somewhere up here we're going to do something not quite sure what and we're gonna build um like some walkways here for a guy to climb up so we're just pretending like we're making a staircase or something so i'm gonna go ahead and pull a couple of layers out of that wall and let's go ahead and build a ramp real quick to do that i think i want to come up to this level let's do like that and can i no that didn't do what i wanted that's too bad uh let's try from here then and then go all the way to here i'm going to come out too then i am going to change my selection to cover the part of the ramp that i want to have the incline i'm going to press z again to access the vertex mode here and we are going to just drop that down in fact i actually i don't love this so before i do that instead i want to just rip these two out and we're going to leave a little bit of flat area on the floor here so let's do that again we'll drop this down great and we're going gonna need to come up a little bit in order to reach our new doorway so let's bring this across the map here that go through i went one too far we'll bring that back perfect then i want to get a little bit of additional elevation gain like right here i think so let's make it two this i need to pull out as well i think and this is going to be a bit of a steeper ramp but we're going to do that exact same trick great so now if we look at it we have a ramp that takes us up to this walkway which takes us out to this door let's go ahead and build on the outside of our building i don't know what kind of game this is maybe it's a platformer that's okay then let's do well that's kind of interesting i'm not totally against the wall i'm not sure why that is let's see if that is true when i complete you know we got a little bit of a gap there which i don't love i'm not sure why that is i i need to play with that a little bit more i might just be um positioning but either way what i could do actually you know what you know here's what here's what we'll do we will re-edit that and what we're gonna do here is we're gonna cheat a little bit there just rebuild it it's not exact i could probably play with my scale a little bit to make it perfect but you know this is fine we're just we're just playing let's do all the way out here oops like so did i screw anything up in here no that all looks fine and i want to maybe have this end up at that higher level let's start that ramp like right here and again we're gonna play with these verts and just kind of drop it down so now we're able to get to the top of our building right and this is all one big static mesh right now so i could chop it up i could do whatever i want with it but right now we have one big static mesh if we play our game we can run into our building and we can start running around our level you know i fell off there the the mouse sensitivity by default is a little bit more fiddly than i'm used to that's okay we can climb up we can come up here we can get all the way to the top of our building where we just have this little edge uh and and just to like wrap it up let's let's add like a little platforming segment here we're gonna add some like floating pillars i'm gonna do these as a separate stack mesh actually actually we made a bridge let's just use our bridge right so you know since we made this mesh before i can just drop it in the world and we can play with it i will go ahead and change it to use that same material that we're using so that it matches a little bit better but uh yeah we can do a lot here very quickly so you know maybe you climb to the top of this building and then you know you take a giant bridge somewhere i don't know where exactly you're going but you know it's a video game and we drop it just a hair and like i said i mean you can you can drag all this out we now have these modular pieces we can play with i mean i think there's a lot of things that we can do here i've got a little bit of z fighting because they were overlapping but yeah i can also you know come through and clone a big chunk of the bridge all at once we could build a bridge that turns we could do all sorts of fun things here i think i'm gonna play from editor right where my camera is here and we should be able to just like run along our bridge so that's all i got for this one cube grid's a super cool tool uh let me know in the comments if there are other unreal tools you'd like to take a look at or the things you'd like to learn and if you enjoyed this please make sure to hit the subscribe button and help the channel grow i really appreciate it until next time be kind to one another peace

Channel: Nu Plays Games

Views: 69,573

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Id: cQjZMQXsQLQ

Length: 18min 49sec (1129 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 15 2022