Snap To Grid

Introduction

This subject is basically intended for novices, since most l33t level designers always enable the Snap to Grid feature of the UnrealEditor. From experience mappers have noticed that UnrealEd operates much better when the Snap to Grid feature is on.

Geometric brushes line up together perfectly
Clean joins look professional during gameplay
the 2D view is simpler & easier to understand
reduced chance of BSP holes
can result in a smaller filesize.
eliminates having to make alterations after every level rebuild (I'm not sure what this means, but obviously means something – Tarquin )
Allows Unreal to calculate occlusion factors faster and more efficiently.
reduces occlusion time.

For snap to grid to do all of the above, it's important to do the following:

Make the dimensions brushes multiples of the grid size. Eg 32, 64, 96, 128 etc.
Never use the brush scaling tool to resize brushes. In UnrealEd 2 it's buggy and will increase your brush's dimensions by grid fractions. Use vertex editing mode instead.

Most importantly, when your brushes are aligned to the grid, that horror, BSP Holes are relatively infrequent, or totally absent from the map.

Grid snap is toggled with icon #4 in UnrealEd's console bar. It's green if active, grey is inactive. Click it to toggle between the two.

other things to cover:

pivot point,
grid dimensions
cool newbie tricks, and stuff like,...when you wouldn't want to be snapped to the grid
setting weird grid stuff in UnrealEd Advanced Options

Note there's also Grid

Rotation snap adjustment

in the UnrealEd Advanced Options (and also UT200.ini under [UnrealEd.UnrealEdEngine]) are the snap settings.

there's a line wich says "RotGridSize=(Pitch=1024,Yaw=1024,Roll=1024)"

a little maths and you can change this setting to your needs:

UT works with a space from 0-65535 (65536 units)

65536=360 degrees

65536/64=1024 –> that means that every snap is the 64th of a complete circle wich is equal to 1024 unreal-units

in my case i needed a snap to every 48th (7.5 degrees) of a circle (65536/48=1365.3125 unreal-units)

too bad that snapping to values with decimal places doesn't work lowering it to 1365 will surely cause a lot of holes in your level but you can use these values safely:

32768=180 degrees
16384=90 degrees
8192=45 degrees
4096=22.5 degrees
...

I've just done a litle experiment with LostFalls, to see just how much of a difference to build time the grid makes... the original portion of the map (off-grid) and mine (clean) have nearly the same number of brushes, around 270.

Geometry rebuild of my portion: 2 seconds
Geometry rebuild of the old portion: 16 seconds

Sorry Dai... —Tarquin

Category Mapping