Terrain Creation

In continuing to work with the tutorial for the Unreal Editor one of the parts of the assignment was to create terrain in our map. This means the outdoors: trees, grass, rocks and the like. Well to start off we just worked with dirt and rocks. The first part of the assignment was fairly straightforward, following the directions was simple. The end result was a fairly large rooms with some hills, valleys and different rock texture.

I would show a picture but unfortunately Blogger is having "issues" and refused to allow any picture uploads.

Continuing with the tutorial I then had to connect the two sections of my map together. This is when problems began. Overall I believe I restarted at least 4 separate times as I missed lining up certain corridor rooms at least once. Then once I did have the corridors corrected and was placing static meshes in the original rooms as stairs for going from the new level to the old level, trying to "build" the map resulted in Static Mesh placement errors. Apparently when I was trying to line up the floor of my terrain with my original map level I moved the terrain I had created, downwards to make connecting the two sections easier. As a result this also moved all of the terrain meshes that I had created in the new room, and part of them ended up outside the room where nothing should exist. It took a while to correct this as I had to start all over from my last "good" saved file. This is a reminder to myself to continuously use the "Build All" button and save quite often.

Finally both parts were connected and I figured I would play the map once to ensure everything worked right. Apparently I had missed one step, as when walking around my map I realized my tunnel entrance to the terrain area was one way, I could go out but not re-enter my underground structure. Unfortunately when trying to correct this issue using the Visibility tool in the Unreal Editor. This tool caused nothing but headaches. When attempting to use the tool one of two things would happen; either nothing or an error message would appear and the Unreal editor would crash. Not a good thing as this halts my progress in working on the level.

I do have screenshots to post, however until the Blogger system stops being fussy I can't post them now. I will try again tomorrow.