Level Design Tips & Tricks
Working at 45 Degree Angles
Rotating objects 45 degrees brings things off-grid very quickly. This is usually not a problem with completely isolate objects like props and decorations, but quickly becomes a pain when working with overarching level geometry. There are a number of ways you can approximate things at 45 degrees while keeping things on grid, however.
2:1 Ratio
When dealing with trims, going from a cardinal (axis-aligned) line to a 45-degree line, it helps sticking to a 2:1 ratio one the "miter" of bends. This gives you an approximately equal thickness, while still keeping your geometry on a workable grid.
This stops corner trims and details looking 'skewed' or 'squished', and textures can easily be scaled with the Texture Manipulator to fit the slight difference in thickness.
Most importantly, it looks correct to the player and scales very well proportionally when making tunnels and angled geometry.
4 Becomes 3
A wall that is 4 Map Units wide on a cardinal axis can become 3 units on a 45 degree angle. It is not an exact measurement match, but again, it looks approximately correct. The texture can easily be scaled to match on the 45-degree wall with the Texture Manipulator.
There will likely be cases where you will not be able to stick to this, but it's a solid rule of thumb when walls need to look equal, and for building out 45-degree on a user-friendly grid scale.
Cylinders
With Pivots and the Geo Cylinder tool this may seem like less important information, but there may be times you wish to make cylinders manually, especially when working on room structures. There are a number of practices that can help keep curved, low-poly geometry easy to work with.
8-Sided Cylinders
Probably the most common shape for low-poly pillars and rounded corners is the 8-sided cylinder. The thing to note however if trying to stick to a larger grid scale is that cutting the corners off a 4x4 square does not create an equal-looking cylinder.
A closer approximation is to lower the grid so the cylinder falls on 16x16 units, and the cut in the corners 5 units. Again, this is not exact, but gives an approximately correct result.
This cylinder is cardinally-aligned, making it easy to attach 90-degree geometry.
The "CZG" Cylinder
When 8 sides are too few for larger cylinders and corners, there's is the almighty CZG Cylinder, named for prolific Quake mapper CZG. This curve is a staple of the Quake scene.
The secret to this cylinder is lower the grid so your cylinder falls on 8x8 units, and then cut each of the 4 faces into 3, resulting in a 12-sided cylinder.
Then bring the corners in as demonstrated.
This curve is particularly useful for a couple of reasons:
- You can world project a texture onto the faces closest to each axis with minimal texture stretching, and preserve texture tiling very easily.
- It conforms to a relatively large grid scale, and will proportionally scale very well.
- This cylinder is also cardinally-aligned, so you can attach 90-degree geometry to the cardinal faces.
Alternate Curves
Sometimes when an 8-sided, or 12-sided CZG curve is not appropriate, there are some more alternatives with limited uses.
Fighting Uniformity
Spectacles and Gags
Further Reading
These are brush mapping techniques but easily adaptable to Mars' mesh editing.
Again these are brush techniques, but can easily be adapted to working in the Mars Editor.