My first UT2003 map

I have made my first UT2003 map, its called DM-Grozny. Here are some screenshots – the patchy lighting you can see is caused by the moving shadow thrown by the smoke and cloud layer in the sky – this is fully animated in the actual map. The smoke from the burning buildings is also fully animated.

During the Christmas break I locked myself in a dark room (my wife was pleased) and started to learn how to map using the new engine. There was a lot to learn and I have just scratched the surface I think. When UT2003 came out I was disappointed in the new engine and its mapping systems but having really played around with it I think its got enormous potential.

The only way to really learn how to map is to make a real map and that’s what I have done. Its yet another war torn city map (sorry guys but I love doing war torn cities) and its based on Grozny the capital city of the breakaway Chechnya republic, a city which has twice been assaulted by the full force of the Russian army in the last 10 years.

Because it was my first attempt to make a UT2003 map I made a lot of mistakes and I think the map will be too slow to ever be used online. Knowing what I now know I would have approached it very differently and built in a lot more optimisation. As it was I just pressed ahead and pushed the new engine to its limits to see what it could do.

Hopefully I can apply what I have learnt to my next UT2003 map.

Here are some more screenshots, the first shows the view from inside the ruined factory looking up through the roof. The second shows the interior of a bombed apartment block viewed from the balcony of the apartment block opposite.

If anyone is interested there is more info about the war and Grozny here
http://www.csis.org/ruseura/ex002.html

and here are some photos from the city
http://users.westnet.gr/~cgian/grozny.htm

{GD}NTKB said:

OG what about the older regular UT maps you were working on? Any word if your gonna finish those?

Click to expand...

Yes I will but its been hard to pull myself away from the new editor while I was on a roll.

To be honest I have yet to get to grips with a 3d program, I have several on my Mac and PC and cannot decide which one to use. I thought about using MAYA as the version bundled with UT2003 comes with a static brush export function I believe. Does anyone else use this app and what do you think of it?


I made the static meshes in Grozny inside Unrealed, which I know is not recommended but if you keep them relatively simple and rectangular I think you can get away with it. The balconies on the apartment blocks are an example of this, they are made completely from a set of rectangles so making it in Unrealed seems to work OK. I think if you use Unrealed to make curvey shapes or complex shapes then you start to have problems.

I also discovered you can reskin existing meshes that ship with UT with new textures and I did this in this map as well (you reskin on an individual mesh by mesh basis so one mesh can have many different appearances). The other thing I did was convert meshes to brushes. I did this for two reasons, one was to make a cutting tool using rock meshes from UT2003 to cut the damage holes in the building. The second thing I did was to turn the UT mesh into a BSP brush and then retexture and then convert back into a static mesh. I did this because although you can reskin a mesh sometimes the way the textures are arranged on the mesh surface means you cannot get the effect you want and you need to move and align the textures on a BSP brush before converting it into a mesh.

Lighting the meshes, and the map is harder. Generally I turn the scaleglow setting for all meshes to 0.2 and I use a mixture of the sunlight actor, the levels ambient/zone light and positioned lights (many of which are spotlights). I also used the projector actor for the panning smoke shadow. I think the projector actor has a lot of potential for some very cool effects. I almost always make the outside lighting have a yellow tinge because I think its more natural looking.