ProBuilder Greyboxing an Interior FPS Level

for this walkthrough we'll be taking a look at how you can create an interior FPS level something like this pretty basic and straightforward but one of the most common uses for pro builder of course especially in the gray boxing stage so here have created a pretty basic level here nothing too fancy just enough that maybe you could start throwing in your characters or even multiple players and test it out see how the level flow is make sure your game mechanics are working well all the sort of things that you would want to do with a quick easy gray box level that you're not going to have to spend a lot of time building like mapping etc we might not get quite as detailed in the tutorial I'm going to try to keep this or rather the walkthrough I'm going to try to keep it under about 15 minutes but let's go ahead and jump right into that so we can get as far as possible so I'm going to start by creating a brand new scene and from here we'll start building first thing I'm going to make sure I have Pro grids turned on and visible I definitely want to use that to build this up at least for the early portion and it's sometimes hard to tell where I am exactly in the world when I'm starting and I'd like everything to start right on 0-0 so let's create some random object use the exact transform position tools to set it to zero zero zero and now if I just middle click on part of that I have the unity camera oriented right there so delete that cube we don't need it but we will need a plane to start out with so I'm going to choose sorry I need to explain what I'm doing here so of course we're clicking on the new shape tool or you can hit ctrl shift key on the keyboard I like keyboard shortcuts they're a lot quicker but whichever works best for you I'm going to choose a plane and set it to a width and height so that's just the maybe that should be within length depending on which direction you're looking at it don't need any width segments I'm just going to use this to apply a texture that's sort of a top-down plan that'll help me build this level out also I noticed that my light mapping is going it might be getting in the way I'm going to right away turn that off under window lighting settings turn off both the real-time lighting and mixed lighting however I'm leaving the auto-generate on just in case I need to well I'll just leave it alone cuz it doesn't matter since I have both of those turned off okay so now things will work a little more smoothly and you won't see those nasty half-baked shadows as they come in and out while you're editing the mesh that can be annoying so we have our plane and what I'm using this for is I have this interior plan that I've created and I'm going to use this I have added it to a unlit texture material so light is not going to affect this surface drag and drop it right on right from the start it's super duper tiling across this plane we can change that easily using the UV editor so here in the editor if I select that face the only face on the plane you can see that it's super tiling that's alright change the fill mode to stretch now it's going to stretch to fill and you instantly have that working nicely you could also modify the tiling specifically some other things but the using the stretch for the fill mode is really the quickest way to do this all right so this is my map I drew this up real quick in Photoshop it's nothing special but we'll use it so we can draw our geometry on top of this just to give a start we're not going to be real precise with it so I'll start by creating the center location I think I'll use the poly shape for that so click on new poly shape in the toolbar and start clicking around so again I'm not worried about matching anything exactly or even having perfect straight lines I'm just going to build this up to something and the height also really doesn't matter yet at this point because I just drew this in Photoshop obviously the drawing is not going to match the grid unless you're real precise it could have been I guess but that didn't really seem to be a need for that okay I have created the center section let's go ahead and exit poly editing on that our polished hip editing looks pretty good I'm going to draw out the rest so oh sorry the reason I did this is we don't have the ability yet in poly shape to make I see shapes with holes in them so we have to draw this as two separate parts we have the center and then we have all the outer areas we'll connect those together later all right so let's create that I'm going to move into a top ISO view so I can see it a bit better as I'm creating or it's simpler and again click on new poly shape and I'll start clicking around to create this not worrying too much about being perfectly precise but trying to be somewhat so I don't have to go back and redo a lot it's very easy to edit this later if you need to so you could just click around real fast and not worry about it if you make a miss click like that I can see this is that's pretty far off again I can change it later even right now I can change it if I want to or I can just hit ctrl Z and that place that point placement is undone but I'm still in the creation mode so I can just click and keep going so undo will work just fine while you are placing points good to keep in mind or just move that point real simple okay let me move through this pretty quick so you don't have to watch me place each of these well I guess you will have to watch it but move through it quickly or attempt to anyway just about done here actually getting them pretty pretty solid precise clicks here not bad ok when I complete the poly shape by clicking on the final point then it adds the top and bottom faces and normally if I were viewing this from the side or any of you other than top ISO view I could move the mouse up and down and change the height unfortunately you can't because we're viewing it straight up and down here that's fine I'm going to simply exit the poly editing and directly set the extrusion height so I'm going to say 5 metres off the top of my head I think that was yep that was the same height as the centre position so hurry we've done that correctly next thing to do is take a quick look around and see if I need to modify any of these positions so yep I do I'll reenter poly editing our poly shape editing and just move these points around a bit so using the poly shape is a great way to start creating anything that has a layout like this or pretty much anything at all you can always then go and start editing it with the real mesh editing tools anytime but to start with this is a great way to quickly sort of move just a single point around and not have to deal with lots and lots of little points and you can click at any time to add more points you can select the point and hit backspace to remove it it's a pretty great tool so help I hope everybody gets some use out of that okay I see I've actually made this area here overlap and that was I think intentional in the drawing I wanted to add a bit more detail but I don't know if I'll have time for that so I'm just going to pull this over and kind of remove that maybe I could add it in later if I want to but for now simplifying okay we have that ready now let's go ahead and take the few little steps to make this playable and after that we'll start detailing a little bit Before we jump into that even let's apply some real basic vertex colors I noticed that this is really blasting out with a light right now very hard to see so I'm going to just open up the vertex color palette here and with the exterior areas selected I'm going to apply a light gray color and for the center I'll apply that orange color later on we'll do a bit more with those vertex colors even to separate areas into different maybe it would be team areas Red Team Blue Team etc that's kind of how I have it drawn out when that plan but for now this is good enough now let's make this map playable in two clicks so I have well actually let's do it in one click select both of these areas the center and the outer and click flip normals and there we have it instant level with some crazy Z fighting going on there let's hide that plane on the bottom we can also hide the grid and move back to perspective okay so though I made some extra clicks there but the idea was if I undo that so we had this it was drawn basically as an exterior and then simply clicking on flipped normals in the object tools panel here flips them right into an interior space right so at this point you could instantly drop in your character controller etc and start run around to test out this level we have a couple issues going on here that we're going to fix so number one the tunnel ends don't actually connect into anything yet we need to make those real entrances number two we have well two out of three I guess we have these funny-looking light leaks coming in from the directional light and we'll take a look at that a little bit later on and number three it just looks really boring so again in the detailing detailing phase with a little bit more work to make this look better of course it's important to remember though you're just great boxing at this point you don't want to worry about worry too much about details just get it to a point where you can test out that level flow and your mechanics etc so number one we need to make it so we can actually run through these these hallways into the central area so I'm going to move into face editing mode and right now I have selected and turned on so what will happen is when I click I select anything that I click on which is kind of a problem because as you can see it's selecting the back face here so if I turn off select hidden now my click is going to go through the back face and just select what I can see so this makes it very simple I can just hold shift and click on each of these faces to select them and hit backspace so now I've created the holes in the tunnels here I just need to do the same thing for the center so here what I'm going to do is use loops and rings to add a bit more geometry into the center so I can connect these up or align the ends so hitting alt you will insert a loop I could also use just a simple edge connection here because that's all I really need right there however I like to use the loops if I can especially if I know all parts of the loop will be used because then you keep quads instead of end guns so right now for example because I've added just this single edge here now if I move this around you can see how this is an end gun it's not just a nice four-sided shape and if I were to end up moving this something like this or whatever you start to get these weird ugly triangulated surfaces which aren't so great so quads and tries help you not have those issues so instead of just doing that simple edge connect I'm going to use a full loop so again you will insert the loop or you can click on the insert edgeloop in the toolbar and sir move it to where I need on one side do the same again for the other side of that entrance and then I'll line up the edges also over here do the same thing on this side all you to drop that in and again for the other one you'll notice that programs is making my life very easy at this point this is another reason I like to start when grey boxing with a pretty high level on the grid I'm using a full meter grid right now as I get more detailed of course I'll really need to drop that down otherwise I have a very blocky level but when starting out this really makes your life much more makes the great boxing much simpler ok so once again I'm going to click select each of these faces and just backspace to delete so our level is now completely playable pretty simple and we're going to add a little bit more detail and interest to it number one let's move this central area up along with the entrances so that we have some vertical movement in the level always important so I'll select both the outer areas and the inner so that I can move the vertices at the same time and swap into a full top view actually to make sure I get this selection just right turn back on select hidden because the sum of these vertices down here for example are not going to be selected otherwise because I can't see them I can only see the ones on top here now I drag select being careful to avoid areas like over here the other rooms I just want to get just the central area and where the other tunnels connect up to it and I'm going to move that up a few meters just enough to give it a bit of interest there and maybe I'll do the same for some of these outer rooms so I can exit the ISO mode now I don't need to be quite so precise let's see this should be good move this down a couple maybe I want to move this entire section down a bit as well maybe I could have stayed in that top ISO mode to make my life a little bit easier but I think this will be alright some of this down just the same as I moved the other one down I think so it matches and for some extra fancy variety I move this one upward so we've added that variety however we now have a bit of a problem from this and you know what I'm going to flip this back because it's easy to flip that back and forth but when it's flipped this way so it's an exterior shape I find it easier to clean up some of these geometry issues here so you'll see that we have moved let's see for example we moved these vertices up creating a a slant or a diagonal on this edge here as well as over here however we have more connections or joins so much or what you'd want to call that on one side than the other so we're getting if I turn on the shaded wireframe you'll see the triangulation this isn't actually what we want to see we need to manually add in some extra edges so in this case we'll go around and add this in quick so I can select these two edges and just do alt E so I'm not adding a loop because I don't actually want to go all the way around through so if I did a loop actually I can't and sort of Lucas that's not a quad right now but if I were to do something like that it would create an edge all the way around here which I do not want because I already have the edge right here which I'm just trying to replicate okay so show and tell let's actually do the show part let's do it so Mabel make more sense so I add this extra edge and then I can hold V while I'm working in element mode and pro builder and I can use a specific access to snap on so holding V I'll click on this blue axis here in the direction I want and then move my mouse and you see it snaps to wherever the mouse is hovering over in this case I wanted to snap right to that point there then I need to move it down a bit again programs are really helping out here and I have that nice proper angle do the same thing on this side so ulti to connect that edge hold V to snap and move this down it was too far there we go lastly I'll just need to connect these edges I don't really need to as you can see the triangulation is actually going correctly for me right now but to make sure that the normals are broken up give these surfaces a proper break up in that way I'm going to connect the vertices as well so I've done that and now we have the look that we were going for there okay so we'll need to do that on each of the others you don't necessarily need to watch through that so I'm just going to run through it and speed up the process all right I've finished connecting all those edges now I can flip that back to an interior space and if I take a look at it in here let's fly around a bit again we have a bit more interesting level some ups and downs etc much better now definitely a much better couple areas we probably want to take a look at this ramp here is way too steep and we should really add a bit to this central area that's let's go ahead and edit those a little bit here so this ramp area over here easiest way I think to affect that would be would probably be just pulling this out to the side a bit more so I can grab those verts and pull them out a few metres if I were being real careful maybe I would make sure all of the ramps have an exact angle they're using so if I have a generic stair module or something I could use that later on but it's not really important just yet so I'm not going to worry about it too much next I'd like to make this central area have a bit more interest to it as well so I'm going to turn off deselect hidden so that I can click through to grab the bottom and then I'm going to use the gross selection tools over here in your toolbar you see a gross selection it has that little gear icon that means you can open up get some extra options I have restrict to angle turned on and what that means is when I hit alt G or click on the grow button it grows the selection out but restricted to a certain angle so the selection won't climb up the walls basically and you can change exactly what that angle is depending on what sort of surface you're on it's a great tool to have in the demo the demo level that I showed we had quite a bit going on in here I don't think we'll have time to do all of that let's go ahead and add something though I'll take this and hold shift to extrude and pull it down let's say quite a bit so we can add sort of a bridge in the center here and then I'll also grab the ceiling hit alt G again to grab all of that without clicking one by one and again holding shift I'll extrude that up quite a ways to give it some height there then I could maybe just sort of cheat throw in a little bit of a little bit of movement here nothing special let's just make things up here that we uh he worked on it and and maybe made something interesting give it a pyramid shape all right amazing amazing level architecture all right good enough for now for sure so I'm going to start throwing in a bit of some connectors here so I hit ctrl K to spawn and I'm brand new cube and holding down the V key I can snap using points because I'm still in object mode here so I'll just grab this I think upper corner here and snap it right over to where there is another vert right here at the edge so with this I'm going to start building out sort of a bridge system in here so I can select a face pull it over I'm not extruding just moving and then we're going to move that over to here I'm aligning myself to write about you can see where this other entrance is coming in and then I hold shift and extrude over to the other side of the entrance if I didn't get that correct that's okay I could always just grab those verts let's make sure in turn back on select hidden otherwise we won't get those extra hidden ones down on the bottom here as I was saying I could grab those verts and just move them around to realign of course no worries there and I will grab the face on the side and pull it over to match something similar over here except maybe now I'll use an extra extrude and I'll need to hold V click on that excess and snap it over so that it matches the entrance here oops again grab that face and pull it over to match and one last one on this side so I'll pull this over it's like that's not quite gonna match so I can just grab the face move it till it matches be careful with something like this if I were to pull this past the other one you can kind of see I just try to point at my screen that won't work of course you can kind of see now these I'll really see it the edges overlapping giving you some weird geometry there that's just pro builder doing what you tell it to it's a very literal tool as all mesh tools so you've got to be careful if you make some overlaps kind of watch what you're doing there in this case luckily it ends just in time and doesn't overlap at all and I'll do the same on the other side right there with the rooms all connected our level is now looking pretty good we can play test it we can start tweaking but let's let's add a bit more to it we can add some geometry detail and we can clean up these nasty looking light leaks that are going on so about the light leaks there's been quite a discussion quite a bit of discussion on this and the problem really is if you have a directional light and you aren't making it using it real time and you have invisible back faces that light is going through you're going to have these light leaks no matter what type of mesh you're using but you have a couple tricks you can work with here on your directional light if you have to have it turn the normal bias down and you'll see most of those light leaks go away however on the edges you still have that problem so let's just undo that and leave it alone the next thing you could try is swapping to baked lighting instead of real time that'll fix it but it also means you don't get the real time directional and maybe you need that for your game so what else can we do you could instead of having these invisible back faces build a shell that goes around the outside of your level kind of time-consuming and not really what we need for this level it's just an interior we don't actually have a need for that directional light right it's just kind of hanging out there doing nothing we're down in a cave or something right now so I'm going to delete my directional light it's not actually needed and start placing some real lights or let's say just I don't mean real lights point lights on the inside here so we can go to tools oops sorry not tools game object it will create some some point lights so you can use spot lights anything like that and that appeared in a crazy spot I can hold V click and move it to a point make my life a little bit easier there and start setting these up in the level so this is alright I can drop in these and just have sort of a floating invisible light but it doesn't really look great and you'll you'll start to wish for better lighting that are looking lighting so let's create some very basic mesh light meshes I'm going to hit ctrl K it was first just middle click on that wall so that my camera's focus there and hit ctrl K to spawn in a new cube and build a really basic light mesh so in this case I'm going to start dropping my grid down to maybe about 0.25 you can hit the plus and minus keys on the keyboard to do that quickly and now I have a much smaller grid and I can do something like let's say I think in the demo level I had something sort of like this where I had moved around some faces have made just this little item I'm getting these nasty broken faces on the side here because I just overlaid a couple of vertices that's okay I can select them and just hit Alt C to collapse or of course click in the toolbar collapse those vertices down so I don't have the bad geometry okay great so that's our light mesh let's take this face here and make it look like a mesh or sorry like a light the way I like to do that is applying a you could use either an unlit material or a light-emitting material in case you wanted to actually light with it although that only works in baked and baked lighting and is very slow so we're just going to fake it by applying a let's say a single our material to that single face I'm dragging and dropping it right onto that face and I'll leave the rest alone so now this kind of looks like it's glowing it could be a light that's great I'm going to grab my actual light that I have placed and move it so it kind of looks like it's coming out of that point again I can hold V and snap it to a corner or something on that light and then finesse it a bit and there we have our light and this is I guess going to be the let's say the red side of this map so I'm going to also set this color to have sort of a reddish I guess that becomes pink tint I don't want to be too strong something like that maybe and give it oops give it a bit more range okay so that is a light hooray looks pretty nice and I can make this into a prefab so I don't have to keep recreating this over and over so take both the light that's actually go ahead and rename this to light mesh so the light mesh and the point light and creates a new empty game object at the same point pull that back out so it's no longer a child and make these two items child's of this or children of that and set call this our red lights and then I can drag and drop this into my project I'll just drop it right here you should probably organize a little better but for me that'll work now I can go ahead and just keep adding these as many as I want all around the level I'm going to move my grid level up back to one so I can place that and I have to worry about where it is and what is place a few of these around doing it the easy way I guess over here they should probably be blue lights because we're placing on the blue side but I think we're already pretty close to the 20-minute time or something like that so I'm not gonna go too far all right we've added a whole bunch of lights and maybe we actually want some of these on the other side as well so let's rotate this around and move it over to that side really not worrying too much about getting this just right yet where did I put that one right inside all right behind the wall all right beautiful perfect good enough good enough for here okay you don't need to see me place lights all day if you happen to be noticing that your lights are only working in some places like we're here where's my lights not showing up you'll want to set the point light to be under the render mode set it to important just for now that's not really great for performance in your game if you have a lot of lights going on but we'll use it for now otherwise it can be hard to see them while you're great boxing and setting up here okay so this has some better visuals going on looking good and now we no longer have those light leaks showing up mainly because we're entirely because we're just not using that directional light which gene was shining through the invisible back faces and creating those leaks for one final step let's go ahead and just add some vertex colors into this and then maybe a tiny bit of detailed geometry just enough to flesh out the level a bit so if I'm saying that this side over here is blue when this is red pretty easy to show that and make the level look a little more interesting let's switch to select hit in off so I can click through and grab that select it on the inside I'll select just this area which is maybe blue base our blue starting point open up the tools vertex coloring tools and apply a nice blue on to that and a red on the other side and then maybe do the same for these little side rooms because they look like they kind of sort of belong to the others or give we'll give this one to blue also I think and this one too red so this is a nice way to break up your level and allow you to visualize it a bit better and maybe will come into play when you start making the materials and textures for your level a lot of times you'll see people make the different areas have a tensor or hues depending on what team side it is helps give the player just a little bit of a clue asked if they're in danger zone or knots or they're back in their home base I also like to sometimes go through and just set the doorways to have or not the dory about changes between levels to have a bit of interest here so I'll select an edge in this hallway and hit Lu to throw in a complete edge loop and then just move this if I can grab the right plane there we go right up here so I have something that I can work with here select that face and all the others around that and maybe we'll give it sort of a neutral orange color that looks I think a bit more interesting again not really necessary you could go around and do that to each of the hallways or try something else you could change these ramps into stairs if you want to do all sorts of things you could do from here another item I like to do is taking ceilings or floors and moving them up or down it just doesn't look very realistic when you have something like this where these two faces come right directly into each other you don't generally don't see that in real life and it just isn't interesting also ceilings or edges are great places to put signs so I'm going to select this ceiling here hold shift and pull it up maybe a meter or two especially since this is a home section for one of the teams maybe I should be a bit taller than the other areas it makes it look different than the hallways and the small rooms here maybe in these I'll just give it one extra meter up instead of two this is also a nice that you have this this ring around the top that you could also apply a color to give it a bit of a bit more make it more clear that this is red zone up up here and so forth so quite a bit you can do there as much as you want a little bit of geometry detail just for fun let's see in the demo I was thrown in some some of fake fake tin pipes and stuff which I like to build just has cubes to start makes it makes it much simpler so I'm just using boxes bring this up to the ceiling and over just boxing it in later on I would replace this with something much nicer of course I've got to make sure that select hidden is on if I'm gonna make a full selection like that or maybe these are supports could be just about anything you know start thinking in your head what should be in this level on how it should be put together these if we want to make them look a bit different also we can select and let's give them also some color so I really like using vertex colours wherever possible I think you can really make your level look a lot better than just a flat white or any other color if you start adding in these colours it looks like you're texturing but you're not obviously it's very quick and easy and there we have it I think that's about as far as we need to go in this tutorial I think you have the basic ideas to work through and complete this yourself you can add more details you can go as far as you like with this again the idea being just gray boxing just getting it to a point where you can drop your players in and run around give it a test one word of warning just in case or one warning many words don't worry too much about lighting right away I always make the mistake of start baking lighting in oh it looks real pretty to keep baking it and changing the settings and tweaking this and that you know just waste days on that so stick to simple real time lighting to start with and as you move along with that you think you're a little closer to finishing it then you can eventually who's properly double-click on that scene then you can go through and build in your final lighting because it is important to make sure and check that your lightning is bouncing around looking pretty helping guide the player or make certain areas look more sinister or exciting or whatever might be lighting is super important but do wait until you're pretty far along I think it's easy to lose time to that okay so thanks for watching and we'll see everyone in future walkthrough videos hope you enjoyed it

Channel: Unity

Views: 119,441

Keywords: Unity3d, Unity, Unity Technologies, Games, Game Development, Game Dev, Game Engine

Id: dYBOBgfcTgY

Length: 34min 12sec (2052 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 08 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/v4n1sh]

Where can I get the interior plan?