Let's Build the RPG! - 14 - Modular Roman Courtyard Walls - UE5 Packed Level Actor Build Tutorial

hey guys today we're putting together these roman style courtyard walls that surround our garden let's get to it [Music] hey guys this is the last heavy design heavy yard episode for a while so if you're not all into it i completely understand next episode we're on to more pragmatic stuff but this was the final step to put the finishing touches on our garden it needed a courtyard and for this i wanted to see if i could just use qixel bridge assets and come up with the best classical looking courtyard that i could envision and if you follow along by the end of this episode you'll have a completely modular infinitely extendable roman courtyard system so here's the process we're going to follow this episode as always just consult the spreadsheet link in the description below you can get every single one of these assets that we're going to use off of qixel bridge one important thing for all the assets you can download them at nanite quality except for the roof tile asset download that at low quality and i know that's weird but we're going to have a ton of these roof tiles and all together when they're packed all together i noticed when they're really high quality it's very difficult to move and navigate with them and the player is never going to be so close to the roofed house that they're going to notice the difference couple of episodes we talked about the idea of having pac-level actors with impact level actors and we're basically going super saiyan on that idea today whenever you're trying to do a really big build really any big insurmountable problem the key is to break it down into its pieces you start at the smallest level of analysis smallest level of abstraction and work our way up and that's exactly what we're going to do today so once you download and organize all the content we have some preparation steps before we can get to it in earnest so the first thing i recommend is let's navigate outside of our garden or just navigate to an open area so i'm going to navigate to this part of our water quadrant here turn back my camera speed down to something normal so now we're ready to start dragging in our assets and we need to change some of the properties before we start building and the other thing we're going to do is we're actually going to create some brand new shapes with modeling tools that we need for the build so to start i have a new content browser here just so i can quickly drag in our assets and you can just line them up like i'm doing here the next thing i'm going to do is i'm going to set up our stairs here to blend into the landscape a little bit differently than the settings we currently have in place and if you come down to the global scalar parameters here i'm just going to change the virtual blend height to 1.05 a little bit lower and the same for the sharpness down to 20. and that's going to still allow it to blend but just a lot less than it is currently all right so our stairs here are going to be kind of the anchor in terms of sizing things so everything else is going to be scaled up in relation to the stairs so the first thing are these castle walls we're going to scale those up to just 2 by 2 by 2. then if you come over to this mossy chapel arch that's gonna be 2.2 2.2 1.7 the roman arch over here this is also going to be a little bit bigger so 1.2 1.2 and a little bit taller 1.3 the roman column same kind of thing but not quite as tall for the column so it's going to be three by three by two and then the roman marble capital here this is going to be at the top of our pillars these are gonna be three by three by three roman marble plinth plant don't know how to pronounce that one point six one six 1.6 1.6 and for each of these roman trims here you can select both of them they're going to be 1.5 1.5 1.5 and then the roof tile which you can barely see that's going to be a little bit larger so we're going to make that 2 by 2 by 2. and our walkway here that's going to remain exactly the same so we are good to go on sizing next we got to change the color tone of a few of these assets so the first one is this roman marble capital so if we come into the material and if we go right into the texture for this we got to change both the brightness curve and the rgb curve to be 1.2 just a little bit darker and then for the arch here same kind of thing so if we come into the material come down to our texture this is going to actually be a little bit lighter so 0.8 and 0.8 over to our trim so both of these are going to be 1.1 1.1 now onto this roman marble plinth plant if you go into the material and come down to the texture we're actually going to change three things here so it's going to be 1.1 for the brightness curve the saturation and the rgb curve so make sure you get the saturation with that one last one but also the most complicated if you come on over to the decorative statue going to the material back over to the texture same thing here we're going to make the brightness curve 1.1 saturation 1.1 rgb curve 1.1 don't exit out completely yet so exit out of the texture but back in the material we have to actually change the tint a little bit so right now it's this gray i want to change it to be more of a brown so if we select the albedo tint up here select the color and i played around a lot with this on the color wheel but what i found works best is something like g 0.8 and b 0.6 and that gives it kind of an orange brown tone and then the last thing with this statue is just change the scale to be a little bit smaller 0.9 0.9 0.9 so now we have some child materials we have to create as well so if you go to your content drawer go back to your mega scans surfaces and i sorted all these surfaces all the materials that we downloaded into this walls folder you can do the same and we're going to go into this roman limestone wall here go into the child material we're going to change the rotation angle to be 0.25 and then afterwards we need to duplicate this one actually four times so right click duplicate and this one is going to be two times tiling and right click duplicate again this one's going to be four times tiling duplicate again eight times tiling that's for objects that are very big and then duplicate it again and this one actually is going to be half tiling and that's going to be for objects very small and then the last one is a weird one so right click duplicate it i'm just naming this tiling stretched so it's going to tile more in one direction than the other and then we just need to modify the materials so the first one this is the two by two so let's go to tiling two by two and do the same thing for each of these so four by four the odds go marching eight by eight hurrah for the half tiling one that's just going to be 0.5 0.5 and for the tiling stretched one this one's a little different so this is actually going to be a rotation angle back to zero and for the tiling of this the x is going to be 0.4 while the y remains the same at 1. all right so we got all our materials figured out so now we got to change the material out on these chapel assets obviously that's not going to work with the motif of the roman stuff so if you select the arch first we're just going to switch out the material here with roman underscore limestone and select the very top one which is the original and now on to our two piscines here i have no idea if i'm pronouncing that correctly so again we're going to search for roman limestone wall we're going to search for the second one that's the two times tiling yep this one right here and the same with this one and if you want to compare these you can kind of line them up next to each other and see how they look alright so now we have to create a few different shapes and the easiest way i found to do this is to first start assembling some of these pieces so we know the right size and scale of the shapes we need to make so here's what we're going to do i'm going to take our wall and i'm going to copy paste so we're going to duplicate it and then i'm just going to rotate it 90 degrees and we're going to start assembling one of our pieces here you want to bring these walls roughly at the same height as the top of the stairs so that they overlap slightly and then we can select all of them just bring them slightly lower so that they're faded into the landscape so now onto our columns so for this we've got to get our plant plinth this is one of those words i have no idea how to pronounce and we bring it over and for these because they're kind of chipped on one side what i ended up doing is just ctrl c copy ctrl v paste and i just rotated one of them 90 degrees and so then we have two and i can copy and paste and move over the other ones to the other side then we got our columns and for these you want the columns to be slightly below the top of the plinth so you want them kind of fading into the plinth and last but not least our lovely marble capitals over here i'm gonna move them over and also for these you want these slightly embedded into the pillar so not just resting on top but kind of into it a little bit and once it's properly positioned you can copy and paste it move it right over so far so good so now we've got our arch i'm going to move that over and put that on top of the two different capitals here but even before our arch i forgot a couple things i forgot these two roman trim and so for these you want to make sure they're also just slightly in front of the columns here right in front of the capitals so you want to move them back as far as you can without that happening and a little bit over the lip and the reason we have two is so we can have a variable pattern so if you get in really close you can tell that it's lining up and then you just need to move it over until it blends properly and then what you can do is just duplicate a few of these i can even duplicate the same one and bring it to like the halfway point it's going to look different and i know i forgot to mention this but i've got my position grid snap value set to one so it's snapping at the smallest possible increment and you want them basically to cover the entire pillar it doesn't have to go over the pillar but basically what we're going to have is these modules of pillars overlapping so at any given place where the pillar is there's actually going to be two pillars there and it's going to overlap some of these so there is going to be some blending some variation there so now i can lower the arch down into position and i'm going to move it out to be right on top of all right so now we've got enough of a structure here to compare against our shapes that we make in the world so the first thing i want you to do is come up here to the plus sign and go to shapes and select cube so what we're going to do is we're going to duplicate this cube about five times and that's going to give us a starting point to make different shapes so if you right click over here on the cube in the details panel and say copy so come back into our content drawer i'm going to navigate over to our 3d assets and then our walls and right here i'm just going to control v and paste and then i'm going to right click i'm just going to duplicate this four more times duplicate so our first cube here if i right click go to rename this is going to be triangle not a cube triangle and the second one is going to be our archway backdrop so cube 2 is going to be back wall cube 3 is going to be small square pillar and cube 4 is going to be tall square pillar so this archway backdrop is actually going to be on the other side of this like it's going to be a square but it's going to be hollowed out in the middle here but we also need our main archway here so for that what i'm going to do is i'm going to drag in a cylinder so if i come back to shapes cylinder and same sort of thing so right click copy and then in our content drawer i'll just paste that in and this one right click i'm going to rename to archway then i can delete out the cylinder here so the next thing i'm going to do is i'm going to drag all of these into the world so we've got our archway so starting with the triangle here on the right hand side i'm going to change the scale to zero 5 two and five now for the archway backdrop it's going to be five zero point one and two for the actual archway so the first thing is we gotta rotate it towards the camera so just like that the scale of this is going to be 4.5 3.5 and 1. and what you want to do is you want to get that as close to the actual archway as possible just to make sure it's comparably sized so i'm just going to move it into position here right about that and a little bit over yeah so you want it to be overlapping doesn't need to be perfect but roughly about that size now for our back wall here this is going to be large and thin so five by one by six and then for our small square pillar this is going to be 0.4 0.4 and 1 and for our large scale pillar this is going to be 6 by 0.8 by 0.8 and the reason that this is sideways is that the material is going to be aligned such that when it faces up the bricks are actually sideways so now on to modeling mode i'm going to start with the triangle we're going to go over to modeling and the first thing we're going to do here is a simple plane cut which we've done before so under try model plane cut and we're literally just going to cut a triangle so we just rotate it 45 degrees is that a perfect isosceles triangle it's been too long and then hit accept the next thing we're going to do is a new thing actually so on this triangle we're going to come down here to x form uv you see how the squares there are kind of small so this triangle is actually going to be the outside of a building and we want the size of the tiling to be pretty large because these are big bricks on the outside of the walls and so i'm basically going to stretch these out so if we select the x-form uv select a facet of the triangle and we can use these little kind of like half rectangle things to kind of stretch out the uvs in each direction so i'm going to do it for the green and for the red and i'm going to make them roughly twice the size that they are here so that's good and we can hit accept we could just do this on the other side as well the next thing we're going to do is set this triangle to be a normal scale of one by one by one instead of this five by zero point two by 5. and so the way we do that is we come up here to bake rs and that's going to take the current dimensions and bake that as the normal transform the 1 by 1 by 1 transform and there we go so now it's one by one by one and so the last thing i'm going to do is i'm just going to go into the mesh and i'm going to zoom out a little bit and we're going to add a 26 dop collision and also we're going to enable nanite support because even though this is a tiny number of total triangles so we see that 34 and 42 just a good practice might as well enable nana and everything so now over to our archway so for this we're also going to do a plane cut and for this i've got to flip it over 180 degrees and accept and then we're also going to bake the rotation and scale yep set that back down to one one one and so now the same thing we're just going to give a collision enable nanite and we're all set and now on to our archway backdrop so for this one it's a little bit different instead of using our plane cut we're actually going to use this poly cut feature and so this is going to allow us to actually cut an arch in it and so the way we're going to do that is first i'm going to rotate the cutting 90 degrees so you should have a perfect circle well not perfect but close enough and now what we're going to do is we're going to increase the width of that circle and we're also going to increase the number of subdivisions so the subdivisions is going to be 64 and that's going to make it more circle like so if i go back to 12 you see how it's like it's like a polygon instead of a circle 64 is enough that it really looks like a circle and for the width of that circle we're going to bump it up to 500 and now we got to move it down considerably so you want the narrowest point up top to be roughly equal to the narrowest point on the sides here so maybe up a little bit yeah that looks good and then accept and the last thing we're going to do is the same exact thing we're just going to bake our rotation and scale so now on to our back wall here for this i'm actually going to build some of the structure here just to get a sense of what's appropriate for where we need to cut so the first thing i'm going to do is i'm going to take our walkway drag it all the way over street cobblestone got to rotate that 90 degrees we don't need to worry about turning off the blending with the landscape because it's going to be floating up a little bit and for this i'm just going to move it to be directly positioned just underneath the brick right here and the brick should just barely be poking out the side of the wall so this wall is going to end up being right about here and you know what to get a better view of this i'm just going to change the position of the sun this is a good trick to know so you can go into the directional light here you can actually change the rotation of the sun this way 60 well that's not going to work let's say negative 120 there we go so now the sun is on this side because i think it was about negative 60 yeah negative 60 puts it over there negative 20 puts it on the other side and so now i can actually see what i'm doing so this wall is going to come down basically to the ground but before that i'm going to take one of these stone walls copy it move it over to the other side and actually going to move it up and you also want it blended in with the stones over here so they're not going to line up perfectly because they're slightly different sizes but i basically lined it up with the grout and so this wall is going to be up against the little wall here like that and you want it roughly flush with this floor so the first thing that we're going to do is we're going to shrink the uvs long ways a little bit so come back down to x-form uvs select that facet and we're just going to drag it up until it looks just about like squares and i try to actually line it up at the top so if we move it up a little bit right about there that looks good and then as always we're going to bake the rotation and scale so now we've got to do a poly cut again but this one's a little different so instead of a circle it's going to be a rectangle but first i'm going to rotate it 90 degrees again and now we're going to change it to be instead of a circle rectangle and the width of this one is going to be 50 the height 250. we want to position this properly so it's going to be right about here we want to start that right where the wall intersects with the big wall so that's looking good except and so for our last two these are really easy so we're going to select our first one we're just going to bake the rotation and scale for this bake rotation scale accept same for that one over there bake rotation and scale accept last thing i'm going to do is just make sure to enable collision and nanite support for all of these so go into each of these select collision add 26 dop that looks just fine nanite support all right so now we're ready to add materials to all these so our triangle we're going to search for mi roman limestone and we're going to pick the very top one yeah so it should have giant blocks just like that that's perfect and now for our archway this is a unique material we haven't touched this one yet am i roman marble or nate and it's actually our second one here now that's not right right so if you double click on the material here's what we need to do to adjust so the first thing is the rotation's off so i have to select the rotation angle and then 0.25 so now we got to change the tiling so i'm going to select the tiling checkbox and for tiling x i'm going to make this 1.7 same with tiling y and for the offset x 0.05 and i'm just trying to center these three figures and then offset y 0.07 and the offset i don't think we've done that before but what that's doing is it's moving the material up a percentage of the total tile so the overall size of the tile is being adjusted here five percent and seven percent respectively these are always on a scale from zero to one or zero to negative one so now on to our archway backdrop so for this we're also selecting the mi roman marble ornate and this is going to be the first one and the same kind of thing we'll go into the material and so for this one we don't need to adjust the rotation angle we're all set there but we do need to adjust the tiling so i'll select that tiling x will be 1.4 and the y is going to remain consistent here and the offset x is going to be 0.55 and the offset y will be 0.07 and what that's going to do is going to put the figures just in the corners there and now on to our back wall here so for this we're going to search for the mi roman limestone and for this we're going to choose the two times tiling here now instead of rotating just like this i'm going to go into the material and i'm going to rotate it sideways i just think it looks better so rotation angle back to zero uncheck that save yeah so if it looks like that you're all set and then our small square pillar here so this one is also one of the variations of mi roman limestone and it's the last one tiling stretched and now on to the tall square pillar and for this one same thing but this is going to be the four times tiling one four times tiling and we actually need to go into that we got to change our tiling a little bit so the tiling y instead of four is going to be 0.6 and we're also going to get rid of the rotation angle and so then when i rotate this up 90 degrees it should look just like this so now that we've got all of our building blocks here it's time to move up a level and this is a modular wall system and the way we're making it modular is with packed level actors so we're going to start with the smallest level the smallest pack level actors and then we're going to move up to a larger level and finally get to the largest pieces where we begin to assemble our wall so the first thing we're going to do is we're going to create a new folder under 3d assets walls and we're going to call it underscore pact level actors and then i'm just going to give it a color to differentiate set color green so we'll go into that and then two new folders under here we're going to have our size one this is our smallest size pack level actors and then we have our size 2 and in the main folder i'm going to have our actual pieces for the wall so we're going to start with our marble pillar here so i'm going to select the pillar the capital and the plant and just one of the two down below and i'm just going to change the rotation of these to be 180 degrees and that's going to give them some variance the other thing i've got to do is i've got to move the capital up a little bit to the edge so now that we have two distinct pillars we can save them as two distinct pack level actors so i'll select all four pieces on the left and then i'm going to right click and create packed level actor centerman z is fine and we're going to navigate to our mega scans 3d assets walls into our pack level actors folder size one and this is going to be pillar one and so now we'll do the same thing with the right pillar so we'll select everything and this one's going to be pillar two now with both of these pillars we're going to reposition them a little bit so if you want to select both we're just going to position them flush pretty much with the stairs here with the ground so it's okay if there's just a little bit sticking out above next are stairs so i'll select these two walls and the stairs i won't select this back one because this is going to be part of the walkway this one i'm going to name stairs one so now we're going to do the walkway and for this i'm actually going to increase the size of this wall a little bit so it's going to be 2.2 2.2 2.2 yeah so that just makes it pretty much even with the walkway i'm also going to move back this part of the wall so for this we're going to select the cobblestone obviously the back wall and the front wall that's below and this one is walkway one and now i want to have a variation of this walkway so it's not the same exact wall being shown every single time and so to do that we're going to right click under level we're going to break just level 1 is fine break level instance yep and then we're going to rotate this 180 degrees i need to reposition it slightly a little bit further up and that way we're going to have some variation in the walkway and same thing with the cobblestone here so i can rotate this to negative 90 and i'll reposition that for the cobblestone i'll just lower it slightly so now we select all three again and this one is going to be walkway 2. so now we need to create a walkway where there's going to be a door here on the left hand side so there's not going to be a wall there so for this i'm going to right click i'm going to go to level i'm going to break but then what i'm going to do is i'm going to lower this down to the ground level because it's actually going to be the ground in front of the door and you want it to be just overlapping the cobblestone like it is there so now i'm going to end up duplicating this five times so there's going to be six of these extending outwards because the door we're going to have is actually going to go pretty far back into the wall so ctrl c copy ctrl v paste we'll move it out and for each of these we're going to rotate them 180 degrees so this is already 180 so it's going to be zero and we just got to line it up appropriately and so now i'm going to select both of these and i'm going to do the same thing and one more so now make sure you get all eight pieces when saving this as a packed level actor this is going to be door walkway one and the nice thing about this then is if you want you can always create multiple variations of these so now we're going to save our entire archway here as one piece so now i'll select all of our trim and i'll just move that directly against each of our pillars and make sure to line these columns up directly with the wall here you want it slightly sticking out relative to the pillars and then i've got to line up our arch here so that looks good but you see how it's actually not aligned perfectly with the trim so if you rotate it by one degree yeah that should align it so the last thing is we need our center piece here so we can drag over our archway just line it up to be directly flush just like that is fine and for this i noticed i actually have to change some of the things in the material we got to change up the tiling x to be 2.2 tiling y to be 1.4 and the offset x is going to be negative 0.17 and the offset y is going to be 0.4 the last thing we should do is shrink this so it's not so wide so it's the green axis here i'm just going to set that to 0.1 and then i have to move it in a little bit so now we got to save all of these as archway one so the two pieces here and then all the pieces of the trim it's easy to forget one so make sure you get all of them and this is going to be archway one and i want to have another variation of this simply because it's going to be looked at a lot and so i'm going to mix up the trim just a little bit so we're going to right click level break and so for this it's very easy you can just drag the trim a little bit over same with each one and just mix it up so that it's a little different and now the same thing so we select all the trim and this is going to be archway 2. so now on to our ceiling in the interior so here's what i want you to do so we're going to duplicate control copy ctrl v paste and we're going to move these pillars to the other side and then same thing for this one and even if they're not perfectly aligned that's actually good it gives it some character last thing i want you to do with the pillars is just reverse them all right so now we're going to take our archway here copy it and then paste it and we're going to have a second copy that we need to break apart because we're going to use each of these pieces for our interior for our ceiling so the first thing is the actual arch so let's move that in move it over we're going to position that directly on the capitals just like this just make sure it's centered properly you want the corners to be right up against the edges and so now we'll duplicate that we're going to flip it around so rotate it what is that 181 degrees yeah perfect and you want to align it directly with this arch so i'm going to move it over slightly so the next thing is copy paste the arch again and this we're going to rotate 91 degrees and we're going to position it on this side and so for the arches on the side here you see they're not quite reaching because my pillars are on the edge so what we're going to do is we're just going to stretch them out slightly so the red axis here is going to be 1.3 and that should be just fine and actually this one needs to be 89 degrees and then i'll copy and paste it move it to the other side and just move that into position and this one's going to be negative 89. so now i've got to do something unique for the back one so if you select this back arch and we're going to duplicate that and we're going to move it to be right about here and we're going to do the same thing again but select both copy paste so we're going to have four arches and the reason we're going to do that is because there's going to be a doorway right here and i actually really like this pattern where there's kind of like ridged edges here but it's up to you you could bring them closer together if you don't like that design so now i'm going to select all seven of these and same thing so this i'm naming inner seven arches so now the backdrop so we take this and move it in a position and you see for the smaller arches it's actually a little bit too big so we're gonna shrink it a little bit so the red axis here we're gonna shrink it to 0.93 and then lower it and you want to actually bring that close to the edge of the arch and so now i'm going to duplicate it move it to the other side same kind of thing you want it sticking out just a little bit it's now it again rotate it 90 degrees actually they're still shrunk a little bit so let's try 0.96 yeah that's looking good so then i'm going to copy move it over the one issue we do have here is you notice that these are sticking out the edges so we got to slice off these edges just slightly so if you select that we're going to go over to our modeling mode i'm going to do a plane cut and rotate that 90 degrees and then move it out and just to about there that should work and then the same thing for the other side so plain cut just rotate it in the other direction to about there and so now with these pieces you need to resize them so i'm going to make it back to one and just move it properly into position the last thing is we notice that the cracks don't line up properly so we can change the material a little bit to line that up so i'm going to change the offset here to just 0.5 for the x and then the cracks will line up almost perfectly and so now we need a trim line along the top of the interior ceiling there and so for that i'm going to take a couple of my trim pieces here i'm just going to move them into position and you want them slightly sticking out and just extend them the full length of the wall just like that so that looks good i'm going to save this as a packed level actor so right click trim line one and again i can duplicate move it to the other side rotate it 180 degrees and now the third and fourth rotate these 90 degrees and these are not going to be long enough right because this part's longer so we've got to break the pack level actor still going to move it into position then i can take one of these pieces just duplicate it move it to the edge so now you know what's coming next select all of them level this is our trim line two so at this point i'm just going to check the unlit mode yeah i can see that it's lined up appropriately but i also like dragging in a point light like we did a couple episodes ago so i'll come up to here go to lights point light all right the last piece for our ceiling so for this we just need a basic cube so we'll go right back to basic oh no it's under shapes cube and this cube's going to be 4 by 4 by 0.2 move that over and up and you want to move that down but not too far down right about there and so for the ceiling this is going to be a new material so this is going to be mi roman mosaic and it's the top one here now we got to change up this material a little bit to not be so stretched so if we go into the material the tiling is going to be 3 by 1.5 all right so now we've got to save all this as a pack level actor we've got a roof but we also have our four different trims select each of those and then we also have our backdrops four of them and this is going to be ceiling one now we can just move that over and make sure yep that looks good so now on to our roof tiles so we have our tile way out here in the distance i'm going to drag it over to our main apparatus and with the root tiles a few quick things so make sure the scale is 2 by 2 by 2 also make sure you've enabled collision and also make sure you've enabled nanite so i'm going to rotate this roof tile negative 90 degrees so it's facing that way and then what we need to do is we need to duplicate it many times copy paste and you position it slightly above you want the edge of the roof tile just barely like that over the lip so there's like a little lip right there you want it just over the lip just like that and then when you do that you copy both of them paste and do the same exact thing so we're going to end up with a total of 16 of these in one line yeah and if it's like that just make sure to move it up right like that you want them to be exactly identical all right so now that we've got all of them we can select every single one make sure to get all 16 and we're going to go over to modeling mode we can actually merge all of these into a single mesh via this mesh merge feature and i'm just going to make sure i navigate into the roof tile folder so that it's going to save here i'm going to write to a new object and i'm going to title this roof tile line 16 and accept that's it for modeling mode and so now if you navigate back to your content drawer you should see this static mesh right here you can double click and you can actually see that so now we've got to duplicate this line 16 times across same kind of thing so we just got to line it up exactly so i would give it basically a one unit gap just like that now we'll select two we'll do the same exact thing and then four and then finally copy the eight and we've got our sixteen and the one aesthetic issue that we're not going to take care of this episode is the fact that every single tile looks exactly the same now at a far enough distance that looks fine but close up you can tell so next episode we're going to take care of that via a new feature called qixel mixer so now we select all 16 and we're going to do a pack level actor and this is going to be roof 16 by 16 tiles so now we've got our last roof tiling issue and it's a little bit more complicated so we have to do curved tiling across the whole arch here so for that i'm going to navigate back to my walls back to roof tile i'm going to drag in a single one and just make sure to scale it up again to two by two by two so we're going to position it on the bottom left-hand side of the arch and we're going to change our rotation a bit it's going to be negative 90 again and the x is going to be negative 65 and that should line it up all the way at the edge of the arch and so this looks good but you'll notice that the angle of it relative to the arch is a little bit off so we can change that to be about negative 85 and so now same kind of thing except we're only going to duplicate this twice because the arch isn't really that deep and then for the positioning i'm just going to move it in two units like that and so once you've got your three pieces just gonna duplicate and as we move these up the arch we're gonna change the positioning slightly to just orient them appropriately to the arch and you'll also notice that the arch bends more as you go up so you have to change the angle for each level so this is going to be for example negative 60 and you want it to be positioned as close to the arch as you can without showing any of the arch and also make sure they're aligned this way properly now on to the next and i'm going to speed this up because you'll get the hang of this and as you get close to the top you want to start raising this angle to be 86 and then 87 and then 88 and eventually it's going to be 90 and then the angle is going to change back in the opposite direction so there we go now the fastest way to select all of these is just come up to your details panel hold shift at the very top select all the roman tiles of course here's what we're going to do and we're going to name this roof 3 by 32 curved i don't actually know if it's 32. so now on to our walls for our roof here so the first thing we got to do is we got a dragon a cube so i'll go to shapes cube and move that to be directly above our arch here we've got to change up the dimensions a little bit so it's going to be 4 by 0.2 by 3.5 so roughly the size and shape of that arch and we got to also position it properly so what we got to do is we got to move it to be directly flush with the archway just like that and also move down in the same way so that's not sticking out but we want it to be almost at that level and now the material that we want to give this is if we come down here i'm going to give it mi roman limestone walls and it's going to be the one that has two times tiling right here and now we can actually position our roof tile so let's grab those and we're going to move those directly over the wall and we got to change the angle to be 30 degrees so we'll move it to about there and up here in the red and the roof is actually going to be scaled up a little bit so 1.3 by 1.3 and that's if you use 16 across with the scale of the original pieces of two and the last thing is we want to position it so that it's just barely touching the wall so you want to look for the wall sticking out here and then move it up slightly and you also want it to actually overhang a little bit more so something like that so now we finally get to use our triangle piece here so we're going to move it i'm going to move it up just like this we're going to rotate it 90 degrees of course so the scale of our triangle we got to change that up a little bit so it's going to be 0.61 on the blue axis we've got to move it into position to be flush with our roof and actually if it's sticking out at the bottom i'm going to change that up to be 0.62 so it looks like 0.67 so we don't want it sticking out past the wall at all we want it directly flush so we'll move it back and then move it up we notice for our rooftop the top of the triangle is sticking out past that so we can change this up a little bit 1.1 and then we can just move it back and so you want the edge of the tiles to be roughly flush with the triangle there we're going to move our triangle in to be with the wall so now we got to fill in the rest of our walls so we take this front piece here copy it paste it we're going to change the rotation 90 degrees and we're going to change the scale a little bit to 1.8 0.2 1.8 so it's a perfect square now you notice the tiling of this is a lot denser than the rest of our triangle here so we got to change that up so if we come into our material am i roman limestone but this is going to be the half tiling here and for the triangle it's still tiling kind of large so i'm going to change that to a two times tiling but see now the wall is tiling upwards so i'm just going to rotate it 90 degrees then we just need to duplicate this a few times for the middle piece i'm going to rotate it 180 degrees just so that it's not identical to the ones beside it and i'll duplicate this one more time move it to this side and when you see this sort of flickering you can just move one of these pieces in a little bit so now we need to fill in the wall for the archway here so for that if you come back to your content drawer under your walls we have this archway backdrop just going to drag that in and the dimensions of this are going to be 1.1 by 2.0 by 1.5 so just like that looks good and we're also going to give this mi roman limestone this is also going to be two times tiling we got to fill in a tiny little corner piece here so for that i could just duplicate one of these move it down slightly we do have to make it smaller though because otherwise it's going to fill in this corner so we're going to make this let's do 0.8 and 0.8 actually it's got to be a little bit larger let's do one so that's looking good but let's check the interior so the problem is we've got our roof tiles sticking out there so first thing is we got to move those out a little bit all right so we took care of that but we still got a wall sticking out here so we got to move all of these walls out got to select all of them move them out just a tad something like that we can move this wall over and there we go now we're covered so now we're gonna take all these wall pieces and we're just gonna replicate them on the other side so it should be six pieces copy paste move them over we also gotta check the same kind of thing so make sure it's not too far in that it's overlapping like that so the last thing we do before we save our walls is i want to add a decorative strip all along the edge so the way i'm going to do that is i'm going to take the cube duplicate that move it out just a tad scale of this is going to be 4.25 0.01 very thin and 0.5 and it should be exactly flush with the walls i'm going to move it just slightly 4.26 and so the material that we're giving this is the roman mosaic trim we haven't used this yet the problem is it's really stretched right so let's go into the material first thing let's do is let's rotate it 25 degrees see what it looks like but we're going to change the tiling a little bit so tiling tiling x 2.0 and you see how the line is directly in the middle so we're going to offset that by half so offset x 0.5 and so then the design is right square in the middle and then the last thing we just need to copy paste we're going to duplicate this also on the sides and for this i just made the dimensions a little bit longer so i made it five so it's actually a little bit more stretched compared to this one but totally fine yeah you wanna make sure it's touching in the corner there and then of course we need to save it so make sure to get every single piece it's easy to miss the corners and the arches and the tapestries and we're going to name this tower roof and then just to see how the final state's going to look what i'm going to do is duplicate it and switch it around 180 degrees just going to align it properly right about there and if you want to you could always break the pack level actors and then reorient the roof so that the tiles exactly line up but i think it's fine the player is not gonna be up that high anyway so the last thing we need to create before we move on to the next level of pack level actors is a facade basically this thing but for the regular segments for the regular pieces of our wall so first i'm going to delete out the archway here and i'm just going to copy and paste our trim a few times and i need to make a copy of our front wall piece here so what i'm going to do is i'm just going to duplicate this overall pack level actor i'll break it and then i can use a piece of it so i'm going to take the front wall piece line that with the trim and we're going to rotate this negative 90 degrees downwards so right here negative 90. and i'm changing the scale a little bit it's going to be 1.2 0.2 and 4.5 and now we're finally using our small square pillar over here so i'm going to move that position that right at the corner of our trim and we need to duplicate that and move it also to the other side i'm just going to rotate this duplicate so it's not identical 180 degrees so now i'm going to take all of these and i'm just going to move them directly in front of the arch so we can check to see if they're lined up properly so you want these square pillars to be aligned perfectly with the marble columns or at least as close as you can and i don't need the trim to be quite as long so i'm just going to move our trim over so now we got to change up the material that's on this so if you navigate back to your materials mega scan surfaces walls we're going to go into the second roman marble ornate plant and we're going to duplicate this material and i'm just going to put 2x tall at the end of it so we're changing up our tiling here it's going to be 1 by 2 negative 0.1 0.55 now we can move that new material into our material here and i'm also going to change the texture to be a little bit darker so i'll go into the texture we'll just make that 1.2 also increasing the saturation and rgb curve so now i'm going to select all of these including the five pieces of our trim and we're gonna name this segment front one i'm gonna duplicate it because we're gonna break it and make a segment front two whenever i duplicate i'm just gonna rearrange this trim a little bit and we're going to switch out the material here so if you go back to your materials the first marble ornate plinth and again into this texture and we're also going to make this 1.2 1.2 1.2 and again with this material we're going to duplicate it and we're going to put 2x tall at the very end if i go into that so this is going to be x1 y2 and the x here is going to be 0.65 and the y is going to be negative 0.45 and now we can assign that material oh just make sure to rotate it rotation 0.25 now we're going to save this one and this one's going to be segment front 2. all right we're more than halfway there guys so now we got to take all of our different pieces and we got to create some variations of midsize pack level actors so basically we're going to have rooves we're going to have floors and back walls of each segment of the courtyard wall so let's start with our back walls so i'm going to come back here and we're going to move this one out further and we're going to start with the easiest one which is for our stairs here so i'm going to take our archway drag it into position and this we're actually going to resize a little bit it's going to be 3 2.5 2.5 and it should be just about as big as the arch we're going to drag it down just a little bit and i'm going to bring it in so that it's all the way at the edge of this third arch here so this is looking good and we're finally going to use our pillar here just going to move that in a position and basically we want these pillars to be flush with the rounded pillars so if i come over here i'm just going to position it exactly even and then once it's there i'm going to duplicate it move it over to the other side and the reason we have these pillars is so that our intersecting walls here are going to meet it at about the halfway point and they're going to cover all of this and so the last thing is we need a door so for this i'm going to bring in a cube and this is not a real door unfortunately we will get to that point i'm sure but this is just aesthetic at this point so our cube is going to be five by one by five and for our material for our cube it's gonna be this medieval medieval but i always say medieval to spell it correctly iron door we can't really see that all that well so i'm just going to reposition our point light and there we go get really close to it we're just going to change a couple of things with this iron door it's very dark so i'm going to lighten it but i'm also going to double the tiling so if we go into the material just change our x and y to 2 then we'll go into our texture here just make the brightness about 0.7 in the rgb curve 0.7 the key with the door is you want it to be flush with the archway so you got to move it up up up up until it's all the way against it right about there and we also want to center it appropriately so we want these two to be evenly spaced in the middle so now i'm going to select our door our archway our two pillars and we're going to save this not in the size 1 folder but the size 2 folder because we're moving to the next level up this is going to be tower doorway so now we need two additional variations of our back wall so what i'm going to do is duplicate the doorway i'm going to move that over and then i'll right click on this one and i'm going to break it because we want to keep our pillars here but everything else is going to change so i'm going to delete out the archway delete out the actual door and we're going to take our back wall mesh here and finally moving that up into position i'm going to place it right about here in the midway point of the third arch and so now to make sure i'm placing everything appropriately with the walkway this is not going to be the walkway that's going to be with these segments so i'm going to delete out that go back to our content drawer we're actually going to go back into the size 1 and for this i want to bring in the bpp walkway 1. and i just realized an issue when we duplicated the back half of our roof see how it's sticking out there so here's what i'm going to do we're just going to break the pack level actor and this is what makes pac-level actors so awesome is we can just delete those pieces because we don't need them for the back and then we can re-save that as the back roof and i just move it out to test to make sure i got everything and then we can right-click level create pack level actor go back to size one tower roof back all right so now we're faced with another problem right because our back wall has this big gap but we're gonna solve that easily by dragging in our castle wall here so again this is gonna to be 2.2 by 2.2 by 2.2 and we're just going to move it to be flush with the other wall but we're going to rotate it 180 degrees just so that it varied up a little bit so that looks good and we're just going to do it one more time duplicate it move it over and this is going to be back to zero degrees and now we can move up our wall just so that it's even with the castle wall now onto our pistons i have no idea how to pronounce these either the little one first actually i changed my mind we're going to do the big one first and we'll put this right at the base and have it be sticking out just a little bit and you want to line up the hole in it to be even with this slit and if some of the walls sticking through just like this that's good now we're going to do the same thing with the small one but this is going to be at the top so now we're going to take our pillars here copy them and we're going to rotate them 15 degrees so not much at all just move them down and move them in and this one you can actually rotate it one degree on the z axis and that's going to make it aligned with the wall much more easily and then we're going to duplicate that move it over now it's going to be negative 20 degrees so now we're going to go back to our walls and we're going to drag in our archway so the archway we're rotating 90 degrees and we're changing the scale to 0.7 0.3 0.7 and this archway is going to fill in the gap between these two piscines and for this you probably want to take your point light just drag it in see how it looks underneath yeah so that's going to be a little bit lower and just make sure it's centered and for this archway we need a new material so if you go to our mega scans surfaces walls we have to go into this roman limestone and we've got to duplicate our stretched material here so i'm going to duplicate it i'll keep the name the same stretched one go into that so the tiling for this is going to be 4 by 0.5 and then i'm going to assign it to our material and so what it should look like is kind of like a wood top but then on the sides it actually looks like it's stone almost the last thing so we've got our statues let's move them in so we gotta position our statues as close to the edge as we can we're gonna move them into it right about there almost against the wall you can tell how close it is to the wall from the shadow and then duplicate we'll move it to the other side do the same exact thing and i realize that my archway is not centered so i'm just going to take the statues and the archway move them over slightly so far so good we just got one more archway so we'll take this one copy paste we're gonna move it up scale this is a lot smaller so come up 0.5 0.15 0.5 so the last piece is optional but i like it so we're going to take this gravestone we're going to move it over and the gravestone is going to be positioned directly on top of here and i'm actually going to embed it in the wall so it doesn't appear so much as a gravestone as an emblem of some sort and i'm going to make the scale a little bit wider you can also push it into the wall a little bit more so once it's looking good we're going to save the whole thing as back wall segment one so make sure to get our statues our gravestone our back wall our two pillars our two piscines and our two archways and also our two walls down here and these two pillars as well so i think that's everything to test that out we can just drag it back yep that looks like everything and save that and make sure to save that in the size 2 and this is going to be back wall segment 1. and now we're going to break it we're gonna save it as back wall segment two because we want a couple of variations to these back walls and for the variations here's what we're gonna do so we're gonna switch this around other direction and so now instead of an emblem it's got some roman lettering and we're also going to switch these two piscines so this one i'm going to move down the other one i'm going to move up and because the bottom one here is smaller than the top one now i've got to change the position of both our statues and this archway so move that down a little bit move this one down as well and i can move this one out a little bit quick test again whenever we got a lot of these pieces just gotta make sure we're getting all of them back wall segment two and actually i messed this up because i forgot to do the two different castle walls here so right click level we're gonna break yep and i'll just show you what to do when you forget something you just select your new things by holding control so you still got all your other things selected and then you just save it again as the same name create pack level actor yep we're just gonna save it again as back wall segment two yep i want to replace it and that's going to save it and then this way we are all set so now we've got our three back walls so now let's do our rooftops now the one thing that i noticed we still haven't done is this decorative piece so let's take care of that now so let's move this archway into position and for it we want it to be roughly flush with the other one but the problem is our material isn't sized correctly so we got to go back to our materials under surfaces walls and it's our second ornate plinth here and we're going to duplicate our first material right here and if we go into this one so the material tiling here is going to be 2.3 and 1.4 but the offset is going to be negative 0.28 and offset y 0.3 so now i'm going to drag that material and see how it looks problem is it's still not looking right it's because we got to resize it so make sure your scale is 0.9 0.9 so the bottom of it basically looks like it's wood and then the top obviously we've got the limestone design so now we're ready to save our entire tower roof structure here so let's start by getting the interior what we just did and then also the arches and then also the ceiling here and then we'll come out and i'll get the tiles up front and then also the front facade there and we've already got our front roof and we'll get our back roof and i think that's everything but let's just test it out and we'll save this as tower roof top and for our tower roof bottom we actually have to switch this out because there's going to be a door here so let's delete that and let's instead go back to size one we got to bring in our bpp door walkway one move that into position it's important to get this right so make sure it's flush directly with the stairs here i'm gonna move it in just like that so if it's looking like that we're all set so we can take our pillars here these two as well and take our stairs and that's everything for the bottom so right click this is going to be tower bottom the one thing i realized is i actually like the look of this without having an extra wall here so that the pillars actually stick out of the wall like you see right there so let's go in and fix the pack level actor that has that wall there right now there's actually two of them so we can go back to size one and it says bpp walkway 1 and bpp walkway 2. so i'm just going to drag them in and break and then once i break it i can move this down just about there now we can save it again and this is going to be walkway one we're basically going to override it and we'll do the same thing with walkway 2. and the only difference between these is the rotation of this back one and so now we are ready to assemble our entire tower structure here i want to show you how we're going to do that so i'm going to drag this out because this is not part of our tower structure we need one of our back walls to do that so i'll go to our size 2 and i'll drag in our bpp tower doorway and it's important we line up the square pillars with our round pillars as close to precisely as we can so move it a little bit over check this side and i aligned it with the third arch there and that's looking good so we are ready so let's select that back piece our front piece and our rooftop piece and we are going to save this as this is one of our final pieces create pack level actor and it's going to be in the main folder and i'm going to name this roman courtyard tower and so now we have to create four courtyard segments and these are going to be the segments that are not the towers that are interspersed between the towers and the reason we're going to have four is for variation but that's exactly why we made two variations of this front panel here and that's exactly why we made two variations of this back wall as well that's going to give us four total segments that we can alternate so now we can start dragging in our pieces and then we'll rearrange so the first thing we're going to get is our walkway one then we'll get our pillar one our pillar two we've already got our archway here and we're going to get our roof tiles and i'm just going to move all of these into empty space so we have some space to work all right so that we keep all the dimensions of these segments consistent i'm going to break apart this one and i'm going to use these pieces to assemble it so we're going to go to level we can break and actually i'm going to break down two levels so now i can delete out the stairs i can delete out the rooftops we're going to keep all of our sealing but we're just going to delete out the arch and instead i'll begin moving in my other pieces 30 degree angle and we're going to stretch these out a little bit 1.3 1.1 1.3 and you see here that there's a tiny little space missing so we want to put in a wall just to make sure it's flush with the roof and then also to make sure that if i'm looking up into it i can't see anything through it so what i'm going to do for that is i'll bring in our tower roof and i'm just going to steal this segment so i'll break this just one level and i'll shrink this down to a z of 2. move it up we want it as high as we can get it without it going over the rooftop then we can check down below and just make sure yep it's flush with the rest of it just gotta move it out slightly and we don't need any walls on this because these are all just going to interconnect with one another and if they're bordering a tower they're going to hit the walls over there so now i can delete out our back and before i delete out the bottom i'm just going to switch it out with this right here make sure i'm aligned properly so now i'm ready to drag in the back and this is actually our wall segment 2 and i'm going to start with our wall segment 1 so let's go back to our size two folder dragging our wall segment one move this down and again just make sure it's right aligned with the pillars here and that looks good so now we just gotta test it out next to one of the tower segments and make sure they match up so if i drag in our tower segment here and i'm just going to align our pillars exactly and i can see here that our pillars are off they're just not aligned appropriately and what's really the issue is these pillars right here and so to fix that i'm just going to go into our bpp tower bottom drag that in and we need to break it and we got to move this pillar in just a bit and this is well and so now i'll save this again and we'll retest and then i'll bring in our tower bottom we're going to try this one more time and now just to test this out before i save the pack level actor one more time i'm just going to drag it over and just want to make sure that the pillars align basically perfectly yeah and that's looking good it's you know slightly off but it's never going to be 100 perfect and what we can also do is do the same thing on the other side and make sure it's aligned yeah so the other side i can see here is a little bit off and so what i'm going to do is i'm actually going to move this pillar out just a little bit to the left here and we'll try it one more time back the roof move it over that's looking pretty good move this pillar out tiny bit more so now i'm going to re-save this pack level actor and this is in the main folder this is our overall tower and now for this one i'm going to save the three pieces and then we can combine those three pieces to make four variations so we've already got our back walls but now i'm selecting our pillars and the walkway and a right-click level and back into the size 2 folder this is going to be segment bottom a so now i'm going to save our three different portions here our back wall which we've already saved but then the bottom and then the top and the top is going to have two variations because we're going to interchange that with the two variations of our back wall to have four different versions of this overall segment so the first thing i'm going to do is select our four pillars and the bottom and this is going to be called segment bottom and make sure you're in size two for this and now i'm gonna select our ceiling our arches our front portion and then also this wall that we smuggled in there and our rooftop just to make sure i got everything i can drag it all out nope we missed something so we also got to get that interior arch so this we're going to save so this is going to be our segment rooftop x and so now we're just going to substitute out this front portion with the other one break and then under the size one folder we'll drag in our front one move that up just gonna position it exactly in the same location as the other one yeah just like that delete out the other one and then we're going to save the same thing all the pieces got to test that again dragging it out forgot the same thing select that and this is going to be segment roof y all right now you heard me say we're going to have four variations of these so we got our segment one and our rooftop y so i'm going to select all three and in the main folder it's going to be roman courtyard segment 1 y and we can break it i'm going to drag in the x and before i delete the y i'm just going to position it exactly it's important to get the positioning here exactly right or as close as we can and now select all three right click and this is going to be roman courtyard segment one x same thing two more times almost got it break we gotta switch out our back wall here it's gonna be segment two and this one is going to be 2x and we'll break it one last time and now we'll drag in our rooftop y and reposition that instead of the x we'll save our last variation 2y now for the moment of truth we got to drag in each of the segments and we got to see how well they line up with each other and the tower so at segment one x segment one y gotta line them up exactly segment two 2x segment 2y and you know we could even potentially have these segments not overlapping but just really close to each other like this that doesn't look terrible right like it actually lines up the rooftops pretty well but i think it does look better if you line them up directly over the pillars all right let's move in our point lights see how this looks i'll just duplicate our point light a few times so now the true test our frame rate's good how does that look oh man looks pretty solid and actually our frame rate is only as low as it is because of the four point lights that i put in here actually five point lights because every time you add a light to a scene it has to recalculate yeah some of these walls aren't aligned properly you see some are higher than others but i kind of like that disjointedness it gives it a more realistic feel you can also see how the archways come together they don't come together perfectly but pretty well not obviously off the only thing i really don't like is that the front facade all looks the same so you see how these look exactly the same as these as these so basically i think i need to go in and rotate up the pillars a little bit also rotate these walls for two of the four and that should vary it up so here's the end result i basically flipped the walkway and moved out some of the planks plinths and yeah gives it some variation so now we are ready to try this out i'm gonna move out our fake walls and instead i'm gonna start dragging in some actors here so we gotta position our stairs wherever we want the path to intersect with them don't worry about the foliage for now let's position all of our pieces first and what i'm going to do is i'm going to save off different variations different combinations of the four and i'm going to name these big roman courtyard segment one and go from there there's actually four times three times two 24 variations between the four so now i can just break this one and then i'm just going to rearrange the pieces and now i can save this as a mega segment you can call whatever you want i don't know how many levels we've got now but this is the beauty of these basically like lego blocks mega roman courtyard segment and so now that we got our mega segment duplicate it rotate it 45 degrees move it over there this is the key i got to see how these intersect because i have no idea how this is going to work got to move out the wall see how this looks we've got a couple of pillars in random locations we're probably going to have to break let's pull in a point light you know that is not too shabby so i think we got to make the back walls connect you know i might literally just keep that exactly as is like a little x there with two different pillars i kind of like that especially with intersecting in the middle there that looks kind of neat like all these different archways coming into the one giant pillar yeah i'm digging it you know worst case scenario we could always break this and then we could just delete out the pieces we don't like like the red tiles here but in general i think we keep this as is and then we just clean it up after the fact [Music] [Music] [Music] so [Music] [Music] so i just want to show you real quick what this ends up looking like at dusk so if you set your directional light to be something like negative 175 degrees that's going to put the sun way down at the horizon yeah pretty nifty last thing i want to show you guys is what i ended up doing where the rivers actually meet the walls so if i come down here should be able to show you this yeah so i just basically built a very simple tunnel made it into a pack level actor put it in all four of the corners in about two episodes we're finally going to get to our real rivers here so hang tight and one very very last caveat is that i ran into an issue that honestly i tried a whole bunch of things to fix and i couldn't fix it i do have one idea but first i wanted to run it by all of you to see if there's an easy thing that i'm just overlooking and that is the fact that these roof tiles start doing weird things when i zoom out to a far distance so if i start zooming out here so watch what happens right now it looks fine if i zoom out zoom out zoom out zoom out zoom out and the other side of our garden oh they start going transparent there's some sort of threshold where the mesh starts changing at a certain distance and i don't know what's causing that the one thing i discovered is that if i set the scale of these roof tiles to be a lot larger like maybe a scale of five instead of two it's probably not going to have that issue so if anyone has any ideas to fix this i'm all ears but otherwise that's what i'll probably do but other than that guys like i said this is the last art last design episode for quite a while so i hope you enjoyed it and i'll see you in the next one

Channel: NumenBrothers

Views: 5,203

Keywords: Packed Level Actor, Mega Assembly, MegaAssembly, MegaAssemblies, Greek walls, Roman bathhouse, Greek columns, garden courtyard

Id: 2RTnpjxLpz0

Length: 71min 15sec (4275 seconds)

Published: Sat Jun 11 2022