Getting Started with World Composition | Live Training | Unreal Engine

hello mm-hmm oh yeah that's me in it cool yeah volume bar this is this is very important it's my buddy tarik yo he's like the best poster for me and he always finds the weirdest my dad had a saying and I'll never forget it he says wherever you be let your wind blow free yeah and Tim knew an ass is a calzone a dumpling I don't know if I can live in this world wow these pose models are great a lot of points of articulation and your multitasking like a over there you you you hey everybody welcome back to the unreal training stream again we have Andrew Hurley here and we're going to be talking about awesome landscape stuff today it's world composition oh yeah so you wanna start us off tell us a little bit about world composition and get into things yeah yeah just a quick recap the first stream I did was on landscape so if you guys are unfamiliar with landscapes especially since this is a getting started I would definitely reaffirm yourself with landscapes first I'm looking right into the camera to make sure I'm talking to but yeah go go through that and get a good idea of how they work because we'll be touching on some of that stuff today but I won't be going into like really in detail about what defines the size of landscape and stuff I'll show you that in world machine and how you kind of use that yes we will be using world machine but we will all ready have a predetermined pre-made tiled landscape which we'll use in this stream as well but I'll pull over world machine to show you guys how to use regular height maps and stuff but yeah today like Alex said we will be doing a world Composition now one of the biggest things about world composition and a lot of I've seen a lot of questions and it's not a bad thing and it's actually kind of cool to see people reaching for the stars so to say they want to make really large open world games one that pops in my head that I've been playing recently is Legend of Zelda right it's a beautiful game huge world really large view distances so then you can't render everything at once yeah you need something like exactly exactly and that game does a really good job of making it look like there isn't much going on in the on the back end when you're walking towards like something really far away but it's handling a lot of you know detail loading in higher detail as you get closer and in in a sense in essence where a real composition handle that so essentially in definition and now what you guys can do is we're going to follow along I have this little printout and I've highlighted some stuff I'm going to constantly kind of be checking back to it and like I will actually annotate and read a little bit of this so you guys can follow along in a linear fashion because this is straight from our documentation so go here I'll show you really quickly this is the trip - yeah hold on I know this isn't the active screen here but unreal doc that's like one of the first ones I'll just bring this over here really quickly and I'll just show you guys really quick like where to find this and that'll help maybe this weird world composition cool and then there we go so this needs to go away there we go cool so we're going to follow sort of in a linear fashion so we'll go from I've already created a blank project and what we'll do is I'll just show you how to enable it and then the tools familiarize yourself with the actual tool we're not going to get into super granular stuff I know one of the questions in the forum's was excuse me was landscape proxies and that's something that I'm not super familiar with I'll show you how to just like start working with that but aside from that like the stream title says this is sort of a getting started high-level deal so this is just familiarizing yourself with world composition there's nothing to be some tips in there that might be helpful to everyone but this is mostly for beginner oh definitely yeah this is going to be more of a beginner thing so what we're going to do and what you can do is just create a new blank project right so go ahead and do that now and what you want to do is the default level that's loaded if it's not enabled already by default you you want to enable show this tab world settings so what you need to do is you can go if it's not there we'll go to window and all the way at the bottom there's world settings right and you can expose that and this is exactly where you will enable world composition now world composition by definition this is where I'm going to read it off designed to simplify managing large world's large worlds one of the goals is to avoid using them this is the important one of the most important parts about world composition is how it handles level streaming and loading levels and information so avoid using a persistent level to store streaming information and the reason we do that is because it becomes a bottleneck when you have a lot of levels you're handling a lot of information and by default how unreal handles when unreal composition or world composition is disabled is using a persistent level and then you you know you have streaming levels that use that to stream in right and and like like the documentation suggests this can become a bottleneck another advantage of using world composition is if you have a large team or multiple level designers and it allows you to sort of any nonlinear fashion work with separate levels and sort of not be able to mess with the other level designer he's working on a totally separate level so that's that's really awesome so yeah go ahead and once you create your new blank level or whatever go ahead and go to world settings and world composition now what you'll notice you know what here I think I'm just going to show them I think it'd be easier to just go from that is a test project I can always open it whenever but I feel like it'd be better to show you guys everyone's going to be jealous that I like 417 on there and stuff but that's just a github poll by the way as you see that it's it's definitely the same thing you cannot reel it up so yeah so yeah as you can see I already have the world comp stream here but I'm going to go I'm going to walk you guys through this quick process because there is a little caveat right when you enable world composition and they'll tell you if if that default level isn't saved I think when you create a new level it's just called untitled and you actually can't enable world composition until you've saved that level so I'll show you that prompt so world's composition stream let's Bo let's just do that alright create project awesome so I pretty sure yeah I excluded starter content we don't need any of that stuff it's just a blank project do we have any questions yet oh yeah we actually yeah oh yeah we've got questions ago actually just a really quick when the yeah answer off your head really fast what is the difference between world composition and level design because there are very different things oh yeah they are related yeah they are related so look world composition is just a tool for level designers right and level design is is a you know it's a profession it is going from sitting out looking larger overarching yeah yeah line idea versus World Cup which is kind of specifically for yeah yeah it's a tool used for people who are level designers or environment artists if they know the tool and you're able to essentially like you said stitch things together so you can work on multiple levels now you'll the for example and this came up in the forums biomes right let's say I was working with I was working on Zelda that'd be cool but it's not going to happen because it's already been made right but let's say I was tasked with working on the I think it's called death mountain like the volcanic area now in in a world composition sense what I could do is enable world composition and I'm assigned to work on the Death Mountain area right and then we have another level designer who's assigned to work on you know Kakariko village or whatever it may be we can both work simultaneous simultaneously in the same in the same project you know source control and all that fun stuff but I can work in the same level without having to mess with his stuff and then we can kind of just snap it together and see how that transition works and we can work together as level designers to have that that transition work well yeah not on each other's toes also usually cut up in Zelda I can tell I know yeah yeah though I've I've been playing it yeah I've been playing like we were talking about before the stream I'm playing a Paragon a good bit recently but yeah my friend got to swear my roommate got the switch in Zelda's just a talk about open world beautiful games I just I still have yet to be the dumbfounded by that game just every little feature that I keep discovering it's amazing great design it's I'm really excited that we were working with with them you know that's that's an incredible so so we've created a new it's notice how it says untitled here at the top right when I go to try and able world composition it'll say hey please save your level to disk before enabling world composition so all you have to do is say the hotkey for this is ctrl alt s and it's saved level as and I'm just going to name this world comp map or whatever and this is actually so so this is actually considered our persistent level right there but the persistent and how world composition works it's actually looking in folders and not for the levels themselves and when you make LOD s it actually creates levels of LOD s and we'll go into that a little bit later when you start talking about layers but essentially what we've got here is now now we can go okay world composition now it's enabled cool so if I did have levels loaded before this so I'll show you I'll show you guys that because I'm trying to show you guys I think the most important thing to take away from the stream is that you're going to come across panic moments with world composition just because the tool hasn't been touched in a while and it can be a little confusing at times so being able to understand how the interface works and understand how to correct a mistake even though you might think it's a mistake and it's just you know you just have to remove or unload the level or make the level current right so let's just go ahead and say I disabled world composition and I'm going to create a couple new levels we'll just level one and sorry so you can add new levels from the levels tab here so go into levels right here drop down this is also where when you don't have world composition tables where you control streaming so you can control it on blueprints or always loaded into memory and you can create new or add existing so I'm going to create another one real quick level 2 awesome so another quick thing if it's highlighted in blue like you see here that means that is the current level right if it's not highlighted and it's gray if it's not highlighted in blue and it's white rather that means it's loaded but it's not current if it's unloaded which I can't do from here because it's always being look it's it's always how it works without world composition it's loaded right it's ready to be streamed in so now what happens if I'm going to go back and make persistent level current if I try and enable world composition I'll get a small error saying hey we noticed that you have already added these levels so here you go this is one of those things that you guys might encounter and don't panic take the time to read the message and figure out what's going on so world composition cannot be enabled because they are already sub levels manually add it to the persistent level as you saw sub levels right world composition uses auto discovery so you must first remove any manually added sub levels from the levels window so it's literally as simple as this you can right-click control left click which will select multiple and then remove selected and removing levels cannot be undone proceed yes I am not scared enable world composition now when you click back on enable world composition now it will tell you hey we use remember that auto discovery thing we have we're going to do that in your content browser and the folders to find any existing levels and they're going to be here there you go right there right here so all I have to do now notice that greyed out see how it's grayed out that means it hasn't been loaded I can load and I can unload yes that's fine and you can also load make current and it pulls from the persistent so that is something that you're going to just have to get used to is making sure that you know the persistent actually isn't going to show up in world composition I haven't even showed you guys the the mini-map this this the actual world composition thing I'll show you that but understanding these tabs here levels and the level details and world composition being able to navigate that is very important and it's a good way to avoid panic and messing something up so so now that we have we've enabled it and I've kind of gone over levels layers are kind of be the next thing but what I'm going to do before that is we're going to kind of switch back over and I'm going to go into world machine really quickly so I'm going to minimize this so you guys now know how to enable world composition you know what it does now what we want to do is essentially export a height map now this is the and for most of you guys you can get world machine right you can get the free download and the trial version the difference between is obviously the full set of features but the the free trial version you actually can't export a tiled height map which can you know for larger worlds that's that's optimal however you can create your own title height maps in the editor and I'll show you how to do that so and this is one of the big ones that I discovered I was kind of panicked for a little bit before I did this dream because it's a question that I've gotten a number of times and it's one of those things that can really break the flow if you can't fix it and it's making the seams in between two separate landscapes seamless that's so you can sculpt on and it just that that gap there just disappears and now they're the same landscape right and that's a really big one that I've gotten that you know before I started digging in the world composition I didn't really have a grasp on and now I'm like oh I understand and it's I'll tell you why in a second but okay so now we're in world machine right and this is honestly when you create you downloaded the trial version you open it this will be what you're given it gives you like a default little and we're going to work with this so you have these parameters here it's essentially you have generators and you can take like a purlin noise and this is what sort of it gives you a preview when you click on it and you give it essentially uh parameters and find like the terraces so for example just quick will do sharp and I can change the number of terraces so I can make it kind of very terraced and they're actually sharp which looks kind of cool so you can quickly start to world machine is a really powerful tool used just like with every new piece of software just going to have to learn the interface but the main thing to take away from this say you don't want to learn world machine right you're just like I don't want to learn real machine I just want to use it for the - what can give me or you're on Mac and you can't use world machine yeah yeah they're Windows specific yes that is thank you for the clarification so what you want to do is this is the most important thing right here the high output right this is what's going to generate your height map so you click on double-click and I believe maybe you can yeah right click kind of gives you different options so double click and these are important and I'll tell you why Unreal Engine deals with Rahl 16 or raw I believe we can do raw 8-bit as well but raw 16 is what you want to use and there's some options up here there's use absolute you don't want that participate when building tiled worlds that means this height output when you build it it will also not only build your regular height map but it will build the tiled worlds and we don't we don't have that option so I'm just going to uncheck it and then I'm going to check raw 16 now as soon as I check that you notice it exposed this filename all I'm going to do is press set and for ease of access now this isn't good practice because you want to have especially when you start making multiple landscapes and you need to keep it organized make a folder dedicate it to tiled landscapes or regular height Maps or whatever it may be and output your height maps there because you can quickly and with tiled maps it's actually generating for height Maps right and if you keep outputting tile height maps it will you will quickly get confused and you might select one that's just not even related to the one you want it so make sure organization is important so all I'm going to do is let's just type heightmap we'll just call this one regular you know just heightmap i have on here regular heightmap we're going to ignore that so save I'm going to click OK now it should have worked but yeah I'll show you guys that to really quickly if you want to change the st. where you're sampling from so essentially world machine is just taking Perlin noise i can zoom out at a very far level and it's just adding like a bunch of noise to it right and you're basically picking with this extense box you go ok I'll just I want to sample this area right here and it updates in the viewport right so I'll go back here you want to build it this is the build button build boom and it should have outputted it output nothing else weird outputted let's see alright I'll just read it there we go right output to disk there we go hey no it's under my my personal folder oh is it yeah I thought I put it on the desktop is that not it over there then the middle ah now that it should just be called height map but we have regular height map that's it's the same thing that's not a big deal we did make your regular height yeah okay cool so what we're gonna do is oh yeah I think that's it right there there it is yep right here cool it just went on the actual active screen that's awesome so what I'm going to do is this is this is actually another little tip so you have these levels in here there's nothing in here I kind of want to get rid of them I was just showing you how how to add levels and this is a kind of a not a nuance this is just how it works I don't want these levels in here anymore I can't delete them from this list they will always be here because it's searching in the content browser for active levels and she's going to add it so I don't want it to be there there's other ways to hide it from the tile but that's done now notice sorry I didn't I didn't even show you guys but I just found these levels in the content browser and deleted them now I'm going to save sure awesome and you'll notice they still exist here right don't panic literally just reopen this map and they're gone right totally fine so here's what I'm going to do I'm going to delete that I'm going to turn off auto exposure fixed at log 0 cool now I'm going to go straight to the actual scene levels this is where you import a tiled landscape we'll do that in a second but what I'm going to do is I'm going to create a new level let's call this a height map level just so we know right I'm going to make it current actually I'm a load at first and then make it current and it highlighted it blue and here's where I'm going to show you guys the world composition browser so the world composition this whole this UI that we're looking at and I'll give you the the keys at what each one of these this is mouse cursor position as you see down here is just you know as I move around and updates this little box right here since there's nothing in this current level that I have there's there's the bounds of the level that's what we're seeing right here it's so small there's nothing there so it's saying okay the bounds is just right here right when I add this landscape that I just created it'll automatically update the bounds and you'll see that reflected here so I'm just going to move this to the side for a second I'm going to go to landscape mode I'm going to import from file and this is where you want to choose the file itself so go to desktop and there's regular height map that's the one we made height map select okay awesome it'll have the resolution here which is I'll move back to world machine a second and show you where that was defined really quickly but if you're having problems with the data fitting correctly you can do fit to data and it will arrange it a little better so I'm going to fly out and set the resolution for you and everything - uh well it reads the resolution from the file itself and that's where that's where world composition comes into play where you start to define you have actually have to so let's say you you before you get started okay I'm a backtrack a little bit before you get started on world composition in any of your landscape stuff you need to know and have an understanding of how landscapes work sizes work and also the total size that you're trying to create for the most part right you need to do a little bit of math and there's some equations out there that will help you handle the resolution so that every time you import it's correctly snapping and you have like it's it's clean you know and that that's very important but I'll show you guys how to work with that in world machine in just a second so as you can see we have a little preview here of the green grid and it looks what you can do and I've done this before is you can modify the Z scale the Z scale can sometimes get exaggerated it'll be accurate but it will be exaggerated and you might want to tone it down when you have world Composition enabled you can't actually scale the landscape with a widget you actually have to go in and modify its properties so when I'm importing this I'm going to actually set the Z scale to 50 just because I know it's kind of aggressive and now all I'm going to do is import and cool there you go and see how its terraced I'm going to add some I'm actually going to add it to the persistence so I'm going to click back on here I'm going to go skylight I'm going to add a skylight just to fill in some of these shadows here set the details to moveable awesome and see how so as soon as I did that let's go back here for a second remember I told you about the level bounce as soon as I created and imported that landscape this is what I see in the world composition browser now if I fly around in the viewport that little guy that's me whoo all right it's fun very asteroids field yeah and so now I can actually manipulate it in here so I'll move around the imported landscape of the height map and here I'm going to make this a little bit smaller so y'all can see it change in that editor as well so you can manipulate it here next we want to look at now now that you have this height map in here actually I'm going to go back and modify this really quickly because I'm not a huge fan of not being able to control the brightness of it so I'm doing something I'm just adding a cube map and for those of you who are somewhat new to the engine I didn't add starter content right yeah no starter content I need a cube map I don't have cube maps on hand but I do gene cones but I do have cube maps on hand because we put some in there yep that's right so show engine content scale these up so you can actually see and just choose from your list I'll just do the daytime and let's see where's intensity and now I can so I'll just put it like 0.7 there we go cool nice oh now we get some some good detail and the reason I did that so I can kind of see the detail from above as well kind of helps so cool all right I'm going to go right back to world machine really quickly because we were talking about the resolutions and that's that's pretty important so I'm just going to overlay this really quickly and show you guys maybe thank you so world commands right you got world machine open and you're like I have my calculations beep boop you know I know exactly what I need how do i define that when I output this height map so what I'm going to do is project world parameters and remember that resolution when I import it said 513 by 513 that's this right here there are some very important things you also have to keep in mind but I don't think it's here because it's not we're not working with a tiled and I think it's highlighted here let's see mini map landscapes snapping first time we talked about bounds dragging the levels let's see aha that's it okay so when you start working with tiled landscapes in world machine and I think we do this internally this is how landscapes work we share a row of vertices in between components and it's essentially the same way how tiled landscapes work and there's an option in world machine called shear edge vertices and you want to enable that there's another tab in here which isn't present at the moment you want to enable that so that when you start snapping it it's clean so world commands awesome very important and then real quick excuse me parameters so ya build options as well these are you know just different things to get you comfortable with world machine I think that is enough on world machine I'm just going to go ahead and close it no don't save okay we're back here world composition right awesome so what not what I'm going to do now is I'm going to show you guys the the let's get you guys familiar with this really quickly so I have a key here and if you have a documentation open I'll I'll show you that essentially this number represents world origin these are your layers and layers can be layers are used for LEDs for levels and any level that is in that layer so just show you so anything that's in a none categories like uncatted Erised layer can be controlled level streaming can be controlled or the streaming distance rather can be controlled in blueprints if it's not in or if it is in a layer you actually create a new layer you define the streaming distance and then you just crisp press create so let's just say SD for streaming distance let's say 50,000 let's just say 50 right what what I'm going to do is I'm going to create now to assign any level to that layer you right-click it here so I'm going to actually make this current first and then I'm going to assign to layer so it's on you can assign one to at Uncategorized or you can you know the whatever lady's created now don't freak out as soon as I press this Alex don't freak out I'm freaking out though god oh my god you freaked out I did answer it's over so notice now it's not now when it's it's not in the Uncategorized that's gone it's disappeared great now it's there don't worry okay yeah I was like I had a feeling you're gonna panic yeah alright I'm scared I'm here for ya so I'm gonna move it back to Uncategorized and it's there awesome so that's that's a way to deal with so if if there is no level in that layer when you reopen this world composition browser that layer will be gone it automatically goes hey no one's using this let's get rid of it and as proof of concept let's hope right let's save this boom oh I was right yes I love when that happens that layer is gone right so you can't edit or delete layers but you can take levels out of those layers re up on your map and those layers are gone so also don't panic with that okay okay yeah thanks I'll try not to okay that's really panicking yeah I could tell I can feel their anxiety sorry Chad okay so we kind of omit from you guys this little name of the level I think I got a little key here just so I don't mistake anything it's obviously the last one in the stack right there we go layers goes in here just knocks yeah and then I'm like what oh where is it I don't know what to do so yeah world origin let's see yep name of the map layers these are obviously we show you the tiles once we get there 6 is marquee selection so this is sometimes you know this will tell you what selected and go that's weird ok marki that's interesting I might have to look into that one and then seven is just uh let's see world size the size of your total world and those are pretty apparent you'll just have to familiar familiarize yourself with this so what I'm going to do is now I'm going to import a tiled landscape we've done a regular height map right and that was cool I'm gonna go back to that I'm actually going to unload this level and also don't panic again it might it might disappear on us oh it might not huh and I'm just going to reopen it and it's still there that's totally fine so what I'm going to do is now I'm going to go to the levels levels drop down in the levels tab and import a tiled landscape this is you would have done this in world machine earlier if you know I showed you how to do that and you can figure it out it's really not that difficult select your height maps and this is going to sort of like a coordinate system so it's x0 y0 and you can actually define how the naming convention your work so you can make it more easily readable for you I just the default works for me it makes sense right x0 y0 is top left x0 y one top right x 1 y 0 bottom-left x one y one bottom right and there is a caveat to working from world machine to ue4 and i've gotten mixed results and i get the best results when i don't when i export out of world machine i don't flip the y and i let the let unreal handle the flipping so what I'm going to do is I'm going to select these guys these are my tiles right open it's immediately going to go import configuration ok this looks to be the best and you can change it but remember the more components and this goes back to the landscape stream the more components you have in your landscape overall general the more expensive it is it's going to cost because each component is a draw call so you want to be careful with that so I'm going to choose the least amount of components and it works pretty well landscape scale you can change the scale if you would like and the material i i'd like to give a apology i'm not going to be going into materials just because it's really it can get really involved and this stream is you know as we know it's just handling the high level stuff and i could show you guys how to you know apply a material via world you know layer blending and weight maps and stuff but i figured if i was going to get into that that's its own street yeah that's its own thing exactly family so i figured i'd just kind of leave that one alone and just show you the tool itself so there we go import tiled how we doing on time we're at 36 okay 236 cool so we've got it in here time coordinates offset we're cool flip this is that flip tile right so i'm going to import leave that checked import awesome that doesn't help me at all right that's just like some gray thing that isn't helping me you know why it's gray alex do you know why i don't know why is it great because it's not loaded ah oh there it is okay so cool and choose load to load yeah i'm actually going to do something here so i'm just gonna actually i'm going to show you a trick since we I don't want that anymore because it's not being referenced and I don't want it to be in my face if I was using it I could just dock it and you know hide it or whatever but what I'm going to do is make current I'm gonna save so you right click make current save uh-huh and now I'm going to do I'm going to reopen this map and watch that watch what happens to that gone there I go it's gone so we're totally cool I'm now back here awesome the origin is of course loaded yep and we're going to load that and now it's back by default and again there we go yep and yeah very nice so what I'm going to show you guys is another cool so I'm going to actually recenter it snaps right to that origin awesome right we're good I hear some laughter which is always good so we have our tiled tiled landscape right and I'll show you guys what it looks like its way this is this is intense right this is not what I intended so I'm actually I made a mistake right and that's okay I'm not even going to worry about modifying it I'm just going to really fine go into my content browser and what you'll see is it made remember I told you how world composition looks in folders right it made a folder with those outputs as an individual level and I'm just going to go and delete this there's no references delete boom save all and I'm just going to reopen this map I know it seems a little redundant but now look they're gone right they are out of the way they're out of the world composition browser itself and I'm just going to retry so I'm going to go Boop I know exactly what I want let's go here here here open now here's what we want to mess with the scale I'm going to set it to it was pretty aggressive I'm going to do 40 that's a weird number but let's see what happens all right cool and now it's gray again yet again don't panic so what I'm doing here if y'all aren't sorry I'm kind of naturally going through this without explaining it yeah so you can click and you can click you'll control click if you want and where you can click the top click the bottom holding shift and it will select all in between and now I'm just going to move no I'm not I'm gonna load them first and now I'm going to move them here that's an important oh you have to load them before you yes oh yes they won't even be they'll be visible like you notice how it was gray right you did air quotes but we weren't on camera for them yeah I did it was the bull yeah sorry air quotes were there when I said visible but what happens is now that I've changed the scale notice that's not as aggressive but I probably could have dumbed it down even more probably like 25 and these are things you're just going to have to experiment with figure out and this is why you kind of want to sometimes work with like a really small tiled landscape at first and just get a feel for it so I'm going to bring this back over here's something that's really cool that I discovered and will discover through reading a documentation right if you're having trouble manipulating your landscapes and let's say I move this over here now what should happen is because these are all using the same landscape size and the same resolution and stuff when you move they should be snapping to the correct distances so when I snap this back it'll snap and be seamless right if you try and create a new landscape let's say you know new new landscape at a different a different size a selection tool new landscape and I'm not going to import I'm going to create new you know and this doesn't this will not snap this won't snap correctly to this landscape because it's a different size it's using a different number of components and it won't snap in this well it won't work so you have to make sure that you're working with the correct sizes which it goes back to plan ahead you know know the resolutions that you're going to be working with this actually brings up a good point chat was asking we have a couple questions eye shadow yeah assets you brought it up might as well just knock them out here what so when you're designing the scale and resolution of these what's when do you want to think about making smaller scale landscapes and stitching a bunch together versus making larger ones when do you make those trade-offs and those choices that's a good question that's a really good question and that unfortunately a lot of that falls on the amount of content the actual scale like what are you going for are you going are you trying to make Skyrim and you're doing really high detail you know high altitude change level of elevation changes like really intense stuff are you making more of a you know it's all going to be on what's going to what's going to cost you more to make and how are you going to handle that so like let's say I was let's say I was going to make Paragon a MMO right that the rendering the it's a beautiful game but there's a lot of really high detail stuff in there and working with really high detail meshes you might want to contain that in a smaller portions so they can you can have good solid levels of detail when you're up close and that that immediately pertains to larger worlds right if you're going to have let's go back to Zelda where you know it's a cel-shaded look it's really populated there's grass everywhere but you know if you're not going to have those really intense demanding calls on the on the CPU and your GPU is doing fine you can sort of work on a larger scale and you know that that'll be easier on the CPU because you have less components right so it's all it's going to be up to the content you're working towards the I guess the scale of your idea and I am number of people on your team how many level designers you're working with yeah I mean it there's there's a number of things that define what's going to be a better trade-off working with larger lesser components or more and smaller right okay yeah I think that makes sense I think when you said CPU and GPU trade-off I didn't really realize that the components individually that's CPU so the more small ones you have demands more the CPU versus larger one yeah well the render as you've got a mole like so the num yeah just the actual landscape component the individual components themselves is a draw call on the CPU right so the less you have generally generally air quotes again the better performance right now again this all falls back to everything I mentioned but also the hardware you're targeting and the hardware you're working with you know that's making games is hard like it's it's not it's a lot of it has to do you know gauging what you have the the things you are working with the tools you have and what you're making it for or towards right and and that's not always easy to figure out so you have to you have to sort of experiment and that's what I really love about game design is that it's always a give-and-take it's always a push and pull and you'll always be like oh man I could have done this better next time right and you through process of elimination you figure that stuff out so hopefully that answered your question Chad yeah yeah I think that that that knocked it out for two different questions that were very related cool awesome well cool so we scaled it down let's see it's just more together you got to add one next one oh yeah yeah yeah we'll do that we'll do that one I'll show you guys this this one's really cool because I was like while I was experimenting and preparing for the stream i was having sort of a headache with moving stuff around especially and we haven't even gotten touched it yet and i'll touch it lightly but it can kind of start to confuse you world origin rebasing and that has something i haven't even mentioned yet it's basically in its definition when you go outside of the world level the world max scale it will shift the world origin essentially so you can stay within the world max scale so you're not limited to the max size of the world what it does in a technical sense is as soon as you move the player outside of that world max right it's going to add an offset it adds an offset vector to all the registered actors in that level which means let's say you move and let's I'll show you guys once we get to it but let's say you move out this way right and your level actually should the original shift and everything registered in this level will have an offset added to it and those offsets are stored and you can you can modify those however the absolute positions are never thrown away so don't freak out the positions themselves where they are actually in the world are still there it's just the relative positions when you add the offset when you start using world origin shifting and world origin shifting is something that a lot of people try and use and they don't understand and it can quickly quickly confuse you so you want to be very careful and you want to have a reason for using it right I mean we looked at I was looking last night at the landscape mountains project and that project is huge right the and they don't they're not using the lammeter yeah it's but it's not they're not using world origin shifting they they handle everything correctly and it's massive and like if you guys are working on something bigger than that I'd like to see it because like then it gets into the MMO and MMORPG content I'm going to take this guy I'm going to click and drag it here I'm going to do that with that one and same thing here I'm going to make this the current level and this is where I'm going to I'm going to get you guys with some of the wow factor here I'm going to select that level and when I move it it's moving everything associated with all the children all the chilling so yeah so this is this is a great way to organize right you let's say you've imported your tiled landscape and you're like oh man I need to move this around in the world and situate it but I don't want to have to move each individual component parent and child move magic awesome so and let's say you're done and you don't need don't need those to be children anymore you want to work on those individually you can actually obviously sorry it won't be updated here I'm going to select the landscape there you are cool so I can actually I can still move and hide individual components or tiles so as you can see you know it's but they're parented or their children of the actual parent so move this around and it moved in the viewport as well sorry cool so in order to clear that all you have to do is click on anything that's a child right-click and you can do clear parent link boom clear right and now these are now when I move this it's not going to it's not going to shift all the other ones with it so that's an awesome little feature okay so here's the one that that's really fun and this is the one that I was talking about where I was like wow I can't believe that I haven't discovered that prior and I've had this question before I'm going to right-click on one of these landscape tiles if you will and I'm actually going to make it the current just so I know I'm working in that level right click it right and if you scroll all the way down here add adjacent landscape level like oh it's Lisi the X minus X but it's like the arrow this is it yes that was super helpful because I was like how do I know what X plot like I have a pretty good handle on the coordinate system but like I don't really understand what's going on here so it just gives you an arrow and it lets you know it'll be added to the right of this it'll be added to the top of this it'll be added to the left of the bottom so I want to add it to the right because I can only add it you know right your bottom if I add top or left it'll get in the way of this so what I'm going to do is I'm going to right click add adjacent landscape let's do positive X and I'm going to go like this and we'll name this added landscape landscape now as you can see it added a another landscape here and I'm going to move this over here and but oh no no it's totally how is that ever going to Train how am I going to work on that and have it look even remotely like the same landscape I never heard that question before yeah me neither so what I'm actually going to do is I'm going to reparent this stuff just for organizational purposes and show you guys how well this works so I'm going to click and drag boot click and drag drag drag awesome now when I move this this should also let's make this current just the double check that one landscape should move that there go it's cool so it's moving it's moving in tandem with it so what I'm going to do is now we have this add in landscape and I believe all I have to do is go into the persistent since it's all in the persistent itself I'm just going to double check here yeah see so I can sculpt oh yeah here we go so you're like oh no how do I fix this since this landscape was added as a adjacent landscape to that it's actually going to count as hey this is also considered the same landscape so boom that seam is gone obviously we would want to fix this and I will do that for you guys flatten I'm going to pick a source here so let's just bring it back down this way and with a little bit of magic and that that little seam right here there's another little landscape trick that we went over in the first stream but see these lines here that's basically telling me hey you need to rebuild your lighting this looks poopy I'm just going to go like this details this is a quick fix this isn't an actual fix just to set it to movable and you can actually set it back to stationary and I'll go but I'm just going to be movable because the shadows are a little bit nicer so cool look now there's no seam and you can i'll show them this too because i was messing around this so now if I'm like okay this looks silly like I have this really nice high detailed you know landscape here and then it goes flat well if you're working with biomes that's great because you can this can now be mountains to beach right and you can do that but what if you wanted some more mountains and you didn't want to import another landscape this is a tool that I don't use as much but it is incredibly powerful oh yeah very that's the the problem is which I still have yet to figure out when you use this the brush is kind of in the way so just set the brush to 0 so it's not there and it'll just default to 1 you just can't see it so what I'm going to do this is the copy and paste guy just box up whatever you like yeah box it up put it in a little present to be sent over to another landscape I'm just going to make sure it's all being encompass there and what I'm going to do is copy data to gizmo and as you can see it's taken that data I'm going to slide it over here and make sure it's there and I'm going to just press control V because it's copied it let's kind of bring this up a little bit yet control V and now I'm just going to clear gizmo data and there it is and there you go like and you can continually do this with obviously it's a little aggressive and you know I sampled one of the more aggressive parts of landscape but this is how you can quickly you can make mountainous reason regions by sampling copying sampling over copying and then just kind of manipulating it a little bit so that this is a tool that not many people are really that aware of their like oh the sculpting doesn't give me what I want and it's well have you really experimented with all the tools and figured out like the the capability of the landscape tool it's it's quite powerful if you know what you're working with so that is essentially not now what I can do is I'm going to bring this guy over right and it's here in the world as well so now if I move this it's going to give just ignore those that's just the level bounce so yeah now we have the you can essentially create your own tiled landscape in this manner right create a new landscape give it a size you're like okay I've modeled it looks cool this and that I want another one I don't want to import a height map I don't want to import a tiled landscape I want to add an adjacent landscape and there you go and Jonas mole guard has a question of a chat about about that gizmo you turn off could you scale that down after you've copied and then make like tiny version oh yeah let's find out yeah that's this is how you don't I can't remember yes like because that you do I have this I remember when I first got to when I first picked up Yui for in the early beta days and one day they added this copy paste landscape thing in there and it blew my mind yeah I mean it's pretty cool i I don't you just put this in here thank you Jack Porter oh yeah thanks have you dancers always assume he's like as a wizard yes we've only ever gotten him on one stream because he lives in Korea and so a 3 a.m. is trying to coordinate what that guy's I've sent him a message I'm like on hey I'm like hey man like you can yeah it and he's like doesn't respond and I'm like oh that's right he's in a totally different world please sleep alright so let's try it so copy data to gizmo cool got it now I'm going to scale it down and sure enough watch this I have a strong feeling this is going to work let's control V and that's just clear and there you go yep yeah it made like a tiny look it's literally that same I love it right there that's cool that answers that question yeah that's really not sound okay cool cool yeah we're learning together look at that so um let's see what else we have not covered layers we kind of did a we're getting a little bit tight on time okay okay that's actually good world origin shifting is what I'll show you guys really quickly because that's something that I know you guys want to know about and I'll probably be able to show you how how quickly it can confuse and scare you it is a powerful tool but like I said you want to make sure you know what you're doing so I'm actually going to clear these you know what I'm gonna actually yeah let's clear these parent links so clear cool they're their own level what I'm going to do is so to enable world origin rebasing or shifting go to the world settings in the drop-down and it's right here enable world origin rebasing are you gonna click that I don't know I did it's very complicated yeah that's tough so now what will happen is and you'll see this almost immediately I'm gonna click on when I make one of these levels current what you'll see is that current level I think for the most part it should snap to the origin so make current yep see how that works so persistent persistent level is just persistent right it's just there it's actually not even being shown here it's I like to look at the persistent level in regards to world composition as just like the container and the container is what allows you to shift along this grid where you have different landscapes and stuff so if you can think about it in that way that might help so if I make current awesome world origin right here this tells you the world origin know what I'm going to do let's show you this really quickly I'm going to go make current on this one and since they're not parented it might shift the landscape there we go so it world origin shifting right it shifted the current landscape or current level to the world origin and I believe what will happen is if I this is current I kind of want to move this and if we move it far okay here we go so I know it's tiny but see this yellow line here that's your that's the max that's the world origin max and as soon as I go outside of this you'll see this shift it outside let go shift right so it shifted this is still where it needs to where it should be relative to this right it's still there yeah world origin has shifted to account for this right and the the problem in my eyes with this is I don't understand it well enough to work with it effectively it does work and as you can see I can bring my stuff right back and it's fine and I could actually I'm wondering if I can select let's do it this way let's make this the current let's click multiple parent them cool they're parented now that this is the current and I have this selected now when I move this the whole thing will go with it right and that's important this is where parenting and stuff comes into play about to go outside the world max oh I wonder what's going to happen when world origin shifting Oh Oh player went to world origin and we're fine again right and this allows you to stay within the world max and that is the extent of world origin shifting that I've worked with I wish I knew more but I just I just haven't worked with it enough I'm not working on my own MMO at the moment so I just I could you're right I could it would just I need a number of level designers to help me out but in in essence that's pretty much it you guys I mean there's there's I showed you some tricks ways to not panic when you're working with this yeah I'm going to panic in big friendly letters on the back of the engine so we need to put that smooth mm-hm there is something I didn't show you guys but it's really simple and easy to understand it's the level details it actually just shows you the position the parent package name which you can select here the Z order you can hide this tile in a view in the in the world view so if you don't want to see it you can actually hide it and then the number of LOD s this is something I didn't touch on but and I was updated you can create your own and this is for the layers themselves remember I was talking about these layers here that you add you add a layer you can set a level of detail so we'll say let's say - as soon as you press - these are exposed I want at distance of 10,000 I want it the actual simplification of the level itself static mesh details percentage down to 70% landscape all this stuff you have options that baked this this is this starts to get into more granular stuff but once you get these down and you have them solidified you can set these LEDs into layers which makes it so when you have thus far view distances I can see Death Mountain way off in the distance and it's an LOD of four and it still looks decent and I'm controlling it right and that's that's the main gist but yeah that's that's essentially it guys um I hope I hope I didn't we're helpful of questions and then we'll we're just a little bit over time so I'm not got a couple questions really fast and then we'll get out of your hair but thank you all so much I don't have here oh yeah it's okay yeah I guess if you guys didn't know yeah oh no no chat totally notice okay good cool this is the summer summer so let's see here um so first up I think you probably already covered this but how do you exclude levels from world composition like you said it's kind of Auto grabs all the things but if you want it to be like not you though you're yeah you so what you want to do is you unload and you can actually set the visibility as well so there's three different states there's loaded there's current and then there's unloaded and then like I was showing you and the right here the levels detail if you don't want it to be seen in this lets so I selected it here the Clint hide in hide in tile view so yeah go to and you can go to if you're in the levels tab and you don't know where the levels detail is there's a button for levels detail and reversely there's a button for levels tab so they go back and forth so level detail select whatever you don't want to see and you can do hide in tiled view let's go there you go I think that answers it yeah yeah okay go back your next question here um in 0:08 5 4 1 8 0 t asks and i can attempt to pronounce that as a word uh-huh can you show where the LOD options for creating whole level LOD proxies would be if you had in Stella T such simplygon installed yeah that's what this was that I was showing you guys study yeah the LOD settings okay um the and I think I I think I responded to someone on the forums apologies because I did think I gave you incorrect information because I wasn't aware of this at the time but we integrated our own mesh reduction in 414 and I believe that came with this as well so we have the I I think the documentation just outdated if you don't read the simplified mesh one yeah it's integrated and that's what it uses the same the same tool to create LEDs so this is what you would do this is how you would go about doing it I'm not going to do it straight up but you just do generate so I define generate right exporting landscape actors and what will happen is now you'll go OK in content look at this boom I'll put LOD it gives you the material that it's using it gives you the here's the tile it's actually pretty cool I haven't done this very often so this is your LOD and it gives you all in its output as a level because that's how it handles it and that's where you take the level and you put it into a layer and then it has that streaming distance where it streams in that LOD magic awesome and um let's see here did we do we already cover lighting levels like this with world lighting is he talking about it was it was just vague kind of how would I implement like lighting on rolls so George what I do is unless you're going to be doing I put everything I put my light actors in the persistent like in the main level so it's going to be illuminating everything no matter what's right if you want thing if you want light specifically to be in specific levels then do that this is we're making sure working in the sari I hit my mic making sure you're in the right level by like make current and then working in that level and adding lights and checking to make sure that you're doing that correctly because when that if that level streams out and you have a directional light that is supposed to be illuminating your entire world and it's not there anymore that means the rest of your world isn't gonna be there so I put I put all my like my directional light in my skylight or actually in the persistent so no matter what I add it'll it'll be there right mm-hmm that makes a lot of sense see here next question up oh oh this is kind of an interesting one but it's more of a question of how would you go about doing this but someone was asking how could you transfer something like real-world satellite data from Google Earth and I mean as long as it exports as a height model you know what that actually reminds me of this cool really quickly to show you guys a terrain dot party this is exactly what this is going to check really glad that okay cool this is that's what the this is what you can create so has your kilometers and you can increase the size and then you go so you can actually type in I live and I did this earlier I grew up on the Outer Banks near the beach already it's wonderful Kitty Hawk North Carolina search boom it should bring me right there hey I grew up right I'm not going to show you guys exactly where you know will go yeah but I actually right around here southern shores area so what you do is you just this little cloud guy and you can save it but then you actually I think that's all you got to do is a export and then what do you want to call this area Kitty Hawk North Carolina awesome and it went somewhere and there's it actually generates three to four different types of height data and that height data you want to use the most accurate I can't remember which they're they're all different types of file names but just open it up in Photoshop whatever look at which one you think would be the best you can import that so I can import my hometown that's a you could literally design the entire world I don't suggest it because it would be really heavy but you could export individual tiles of the entire world if you wanted to and remake the earth in world composition yeah that's incredible yeah we have people in chat talking about how they've actually a couple of people apparently use this before and thought it was very interesting yeah it's really cool it's a I don't use it that often because world machine I like procedural stuff and world machine does a great job of that and I like regular landscape sculpting and stuff it's fun to me so and we're not going to get into super deep detailing because you and I had talked about this before we definitely want to address it this does like these tool sets and features do work for online like so some gas station like you can for application they these were actually designed by Jack Porter for a few games that were coming out in eastern Asia that they needed larger world support and so they they actually added this in for those yeah and and they were kind of like quieter games games that I don't know if I even remember the titles of it was a lot yeah well now yeah and um and so yeah that they're definitely capable of doing it but we'd have to create a whole stream around making sure that we cover replication properly yeah and I have Jack Porter on fidelity yeah I would definitely want him to be doing over multiplayer today yeah what we did cover how to implement everything else yeah so there is that on the documentation for this person asking the question we do have two points on how to do this implement so how to work around this if implement your own server solution so and it's in most MMO licensees do this but you could also implement some layer between clients and unreal dedicated servers which will transform shifted absolute positions from the clients and route them to the right dedicated servers so basically having a dedicated server set up this is where I would say if you can avoid using world origin shifting it's going to make multiplayer a lot easier because we say specifically in the documentation to if you disabled world origin shifting you can run a tiled world with a dedicated server dedicated servers will load all distance dependent levels and each connected client will work as usual so it'll basically be on the client to handle that instead of the server and so which is a lot you know that's it's a lot easier for networking just generally so yeah so I wish I wouldn't know I wish I knew more about multiplayer but I just don't because I'm going to be a replication yeah I just don't I don't have that so this is hey this is important and I keep having to put this out on Twitter it so you don't always make your artist do you know net code that's not always like yeah yeah come on don't give them a lot of people really not always like you unless your artist is really good at net code for some reason he used to be a hacker back in the day they were really good you know but yeah generally separating jobs out and again that's why you want to have lots of different yeah and that's why a world composition is used for larger teams you know you have people dedicated to networking and replication and they can work with the level designer to understand world composition so they can integrate their own solution alright and so that's about what we have for time today these were we had a few more questions but if we didn't get to your question today make sure to come to forms at Unreal Engine comm come to the events section and you'll see a forum post for this live stream where we were taking questions and answering them there I just want to say thank you all for coming out we will have a awesome stream for you guys on Thursday also 2:00 p.m. so make sure you tune in for that and see thank you so much Andrew for coming out why I call Rick I almost forgot to say thank you to it steadily cool it's totally awesome I just angel a out with you yeah it's been fun I really appreciate everyone's like you know questions you guys do a great job of asking me good questions and I about to do my best to try and answer them so I appreciate that yep all right so remember to like follow subscribe hit all the little buttons and all the things depending on what social media or form of you know technology you were watching us on I know they'll have different things and we're streaming to so many different some buttons now press the button it so you'll get updates about from us your humble humble developers hey yeah so yeah we'll see you all the next time later thank you Oh

Channel: Unreal Engine

Views: 163,205

Keywords: Game Development

Id: FrcNClb6KUI

Length: 75min 20sec (4520 seconds)

Published: Wed May 17 2017