Adding Pools To Your Maps

This tutorial assumes that you have completed the tutorial Creating Your First Map. It assumes you have knowledge how to create a room, add lighting and a player starting position. If you have do not know how to do this, please read the previous tutorial.

In this tutorial we are going to cover:

Using multiple primitives to build rooms.
How to use sheets to separate zones.
How to add special brushes(in this case water).
How to add zone effects(in this case a waterzone).
How to add lighting effects.

Create a room, size it with dimensions of at least 256x1024x1024. You need to have a fairly large sized rooom in order to place a room in the center. Assign it textures, and add a light source to your map. Go ahead an add a player start position so we will be ready to test the map after we add our pool.

Now create a second room that is smaller than the first(This is the area which will contain your pool). I suggest no larger than 256x512x512. Give it a texture and build click the Subtract From World icon. You will want to grab drag this from your Y window(The one in the upper right hand corner). Select the primitive and hold down the CTRL key. You want to drag the cube so that it is even with the bottom of your original room. Like in the illustration below.



Why did we want to have this room bordered exactly with the other room we have created? Well with Unreal's mapping technique this is how we define multiple rooms. If they share borders then it creates what is similar to a hallway without a door. This will all become apparent when we run our map.

Next we need to create a Sheet. Click on the Build Sheet icon(shown to the left). Set the values to the same values that you used in your second cube(the pool cube). If you followed my default values that would be 512x512. Now select this sheet on your Y window(upper right) and drag it to be slighly lower than the top of the pool(see illustration below). We make it slightly below to give the appearance of a real pool. Without this boundary the water would flood into the main room.



Now we must define this as a boundary. Click the Add Special Brush icon(as seen to the left). Click on the Predefined box and select Water. Leave the default setting and hit the Add Special button.

Let's rebuild our geometry. Hit F8 and select Rebuild Geometry. Be sure you have assigned some lights into the room already. If not you will have to set mode to Textured.

Now select the top of our water sheet. Time to load a texture for the water. The default water textures are located in the Liquids.utx file. Select a brush that fits your tastes.

Now it's time to add the actual water to our map. Change our Browse bar to Classes. Expand to Info->ZoneInfo. Select WaterZone. Go into your viewpoint window(lower left) and move into the middle of your pool. Hit the right mouse button and select Add WaterZone Here. This adds water into our pool.

Now select your WaterZone actor. Select Waterzone Properties from the menu. What we want to do now is add a lighting effect for our water and a low dripping sound. Expand Zone Lighting in the menu. Set your Ambient Brightness to something similar to 182. Set the Ambient Hue to somewhere near the 150-160 range. The hue is your light color. And this value will make it a red light. Set Ambient Saturation to 0. This causes our light to be the true blue color. Saturation values give it a more white and normal look to lighting.

Now it is time to add some sound to our water. Expand the Sound menu. Select Ambient Sound from the menu and click the .. button. This will bring up a listing of sounds. Select the General tab and choose the a sound, perhaps Drip1. Now go back to the Ambient Sound menu item and select the Use button.

Now we have a lit pool that makes a sound. The last step we need to do is add a watery lighting effect to our room. Add a light above the middle our pool. Now select the light and hit the right mouse button. Select Light Properties from the menu. Expand the LightColor menu. Set your LightBrightness, LightHue, and LightSaturation setting to the same values you set the water's ambient settings(182,150-160,0).

Now expand the Lighting menu item. Select the LightEffect item and change the value to LE_WateryShimmer. Now we are ready to rebuild geometry(F8) and test our map(CTRL+P).

We have covered a lot of ground in this tutorial. You may download this tutorial by clicking here. Stay tuned for more tutorials in the future!

Written 5/28/98 by J.C. Smith