UE4 Tutorial: Introduction to Geometry Brushes (BSP)

so let's take a look at geometry brushes you find them under the modes place tab and there's a whole list of things here that you can drag and drop into your level we'll just start with a simple box here and I'll just click and drag that in and I just want to start by showing you that you can size it over here in the details panel once you've dragged something and using the XYZ details here so I'm going to make it 500 on all axes and then just to show you that it's possible with some of the brushes not all of them you can also make them Hollow and one of the things that that's good for particularly when you're working with a cube like this is it's a very fast way of creating a room because it gives you walls floor and a ceiling of your space now a sized my cube 500 by 500 by 500 because the base size of a character inside Unreal Engine 4 is 200 so I knew that that would make it tall enough for me to walk inside once I'm playing the game so to make it a hollow insider just check this box called hollow and then you can walk inside the cube that you've created and you can see you've got a floor wall and a ceiling now I just whacked a simple point line inside because otherwise it would be all dark in here so I'm just gonna add another box brush and just show you that you can also scale it using the normal scale tool so I could just scale this up a little bit or out in one particular direction but notice when you do that that over in the details panel it doesn't change anything there and as soon as I do change something over in the details panel say for example like this it undoes most of the scaling that I've done here so it's a kind of either/or thing scale with the scale tool or scale with the numbers here so down the bottom of the brush section here you can see you've got two buttons one called ad and one called subtract and that's how you can create more complex shapes you can also set it over here in details you can see here you've got the choice of additive or subtractive so what I'll do now is grab a sphere drag it in and each brush type has various different settings and one thing you want to set on your sphere is the tessellation which is the number of different triangle faces you've got on your sphere so I'm just going to set that to 4 which will make it look a bit more sphere like and I'll scale my sphere down a bit using just the simple scale tool and then I'm gonna make it subtractive and what a subtractive object does is it will cut a hole inside another brush so inside an additive brush you need to add the additive brush first and then you can add the subtractive brush to cut a hole and that might be a hole that's just partial like you can see here so if I just deselect that sphere you can see we've just got a little kind of sphere shaped like Swiss cheese hole happening or you can create a hole that is completely through something so if I move this sphere so that it goes through my floor you can see I've now got a complete hole happening in the floor another way that you can edit geometry brushes is to go into geometry editing mode and that's the last tab in your modes panel so if you click on that tab you can actually then select individual vertices of any kind of geometry brush shape that you have and move those vertices independently of each other that allows you to create more complex shapes so I've just adjusted a cube here to create a column shape and I just want to show you something that you can do is pivot points now whether you're working with a geometry brush or with a static mesh this first part works exactly the same if you hold down your middle mouse on the center point of the move tool so on that white sphere on the center point of the move tool you can actually move the pivot point of that particular object to any position that you like and that can be useful let's say for example you want to do a rotation on something and you want that rotation to not be from the center point but to be from the end point of the object so that enables me to rotate in an arc around here with this particular object now once you've done that as soon as you click away from the object and deselect it you'll see that my pivot point moved back to exactly where it was so it's just a temporary move but just for brush shapes not for static meshes you can actually make that the change of pivot point happen permanently and to do that you need to be in orthographic view on your particular shape and you need to position the pivot point using one of the orthographic views inside the orthographic view you have to hold down because holding down the middle mouse inside orthographic view does measuring is a way of measuring things you actually have to hold down two keys so you have to hold down the middle mouse button and the left mouse button while you're moving the pivot point so I can now just move that power point directly down to the bottom of my shape and to make it stay there I need to right-click on a blank area of my orthographic view so I just right clicked then and I go down to the section that says pivot and I choose save pivot to prove it and that's going to save it so now when I click away and I deselect my shape and then I select it again can see that I've actually permanently moved that pivot point and in fact I should have paid attention to what I was doing because it's not exactly in the right spot doesn't matter you could just do that again another useful setting on a geometry brush is the setting that you can find under when you've got a surface selected under geometry here where you can set the alignment of the actual way that the material is applied to the surface so you can see here I've got three different geometry brushes and yet I've applied the same material to them these bottom two have got surface planar wall floss are selected and the wall one has got wall selected and that means as we look across these surfaces you can see that my materials are aligning perfectly another thing you can do with a material when it's applied to the surface so I'm just going to drag and drop a material that I've made here out of a texture that included some text element on it well the first thing I can play with is the alignment and that will change the way that the texture is mapped to the surface so now if I choose wall you can see that now my text is actually the right way up but I want only one version of my word to be on this so what I'm going to choose instead is this bottom one that's called align surface fit and you can see here that then means that my text element which I turned into a material with transparency in it is now fully filling that shape now obviously it's distorted a bit because the shape is the wrong kind of dimensions but if I made something that was the right kind of size it would look fine now look what happens when I apply the same wood texture as the floor onto this wall the first thing to see is that the way that the boards are running here are in the opposite direction to the floor and what say I want them to be the same direction well changing it to be surface plane all doesn't make any difference but the other setting that you can change is down here where it says surface properties you can actually rotate and flip and scale the way that the texture is applied to the surface of any brush again this is only on brushes so if I rotate this texture by 90 degrees now you can see I've got my floor and my wall lining up

Channel: Brigid Costello

Views: 47,793

Keywords: UE4, Unreal Engine (Video Game Engine Family), Unreal Engine 4, Geometry Brush, BSP, Beginner, Shift Pivot

Id: MEkwlDMSSAE

Length: 9min 1sec (541 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 29 2015