mirroring

[vindicate]

Hello every body

It sounds easy to mirror some objects, but i got very hard time with it.
I got a mirrorised map, and i designed only one half. So my idea was to mirror on the end to make sure both sides are the same.
But as soon i select what i want and mirror it, only sprites seemes to work properly. All meshes are compleetly confused. even if i take a single one of them, that has turned two ways. It cant be mirrored as it should be, infact it turns it rather than mirror it.
If this is really not possible it will take me hours and hours just to mirror the map, since i got many objects!

I use ut2004 editor, and try to make a nice bommer run.
the handling i do is select te object i want, right mouse button, transform, mirror about Y.
Even if i use X the effect is the same as Y (wich i think its also not right).
Does any one have a nice trick to mirror??
(If it is not clear what i mean i can make a screenshot, but its really not hard to understand.)

vince

 

[Pandemonium]

I think the problem has sth to do with the pivot (the small red point/cross, visible when you mark an objekt). All objects, like brushes or static meshes, will be mirrored "around" the pivot.

That means if the pivot is in the middle of the sm it will be mirrored in another way as if the pivot is in the right/left corner. And each object has its own pivot. If you mark a brush you can move the pivot, but sms have static pivots, so you cannot change them..

Afaik, there is no other possiblilty to mirror the whole map than to build the second half by youself..


Ps: I'm from Germany, so don't worry if I have some mistakes in my text..

 

[MartinW]

try to doublicate and rotate it

 

[Bot_40]

Mirroring is a real pain, it's a lot easier to design maps so you can rotate them about 180 degrees rather than mirroring. Brushes are normally ok but for meshes you need to change the drawscale so that the X or Y scale is -
For example, if you have a mesh with an X drawscale of 10 and you are mirroring your map about the X axis then you need to change the X drawscale of that mesh to -10 to mirror it in the X axis.
Yeah...this does mean if you have 1000 meshes all with different drawscales you have to manually mirror every single one individually and move it into place on the other side of the map...A real pain I know but there is no other way, I had to do it with over 2000 meshes in one of my maps. This is why you should aim to rotate your map rather than mirror it

 

[vindicate]

yeah my first map was double mirrored, so i could rotate it 180 degrees. Well tnx for the help, i better start replace all meshes. The only thing left what might help is to use the active brush. So bring the static mesh back as a brush, mirror it, make it a new static mesh. But i'm afriad the map will reach in a big size, since it is already 25mb, and it isn't compleetly finished. However my first map is 56mb, so i doubt this map will get bigger then that.

 

[Bot_40]

Really really wouldn't do that, you lose a lot of the optimisations you get from having a static mesh in the first place. For a start, when you have a vertex on a static mesh, the vertex is shared between all the surfaces that connect to it. So on a cube you simply have 8 vertecies however, on a brush, every surface has it's own unique vertecies so on a simple cube it increases up to 24. You can imagine how much higher that number gets when you have a complex static mesh!

 

[vindicate]

yeah but whats the differance, if i make all meshes myself by using the brush in the first place. I tryed one object what is very crucial for my oriantation. its an exact copy, only mirrored

 

[vindicate]

i looked now also of the number triangles, both objects are compleetly identical.

 

[Bot_40]

The difference is in the number of vertecies, not the number of tris. More vertecies also = more work for the graphics card to do + greater mem usage.

I didn't realise you made the meshes out of brushes in the first place (not advisable but it's already done now ), in this case there will be no difference converting back to brush then to mesh again so that's fine since each poly will already have it's own unique vertecies instead of shared vertecies.
It will however be harsher on filesize + memory usage if you have 2 different meshes for different orientations.

 

[vindicate]

hmm how would you make a mesh instead?

 

[Bot_40]

The best way to do it is use an external 3d program like 3D studio max, Maya or Lightwave. They are extremely expensive but you can actually find them easilly enough if you know where to look *cough*hint
Or there is also a "personal learning edition" of maya included with UT2k4 on the cd.

If you need convincing then there's a nice article here:
http://angelmapper.com/tutorials/uedmeshes.htm

And I won't lie, it takes a while to get used to using another 3d program like 3d studio max. It maybe took me 1-2 months to be able to make some decent meshes for use in UED but imo it's worth the extra time. If you do decide to give it a go, remember they are proper professional 3d rendering programs so don't be intimidated by the millions (literallly!) of different options. You only need to use maybe 0.01% if that.

There's some info and links here:
http://wiki.beyondunreal.com/wiki/Static_Mesh_Modeling
And there's also about 2476892 tutorials on the internet for modelling if you search google.

 

[vindicate]

hehe lol, tnx.
Maybe you can awnser this question. every time i load the map i get this message of an loading error of this texture: TexEnvMap CuveMaps.skin0_envMapCoords. It also say that if i safe now it will be set to null. but as long i can remember buiding this map this message keeps coming back. i aslo played the map now for the first time. the inside game menu refuses to give the screenshot of the map, what tells me that something is missing, as the editor warns me. However i can play the map without noticing it. But is sure like to have a screenshot.

 

[Bot_40]

I don't know, I've not had this error before

 

[vindicate]

hehe great, i try figure out to fix it, like add what he wants. well tnx for the help. I think i relese the map as soon i played it couple times, to find bugs on my own. You want to test it though?

 

[Bot_40]

There's a good beta testing system over at www.unrealplayground.com where you can upload your beta map for it to be tested for up to 30 days if you want

 

[vindicate]

It seemed i don't have much time to change it anyway. so i relsed it before i "forget" it
http://nalicity.beyondunreal.com/map_hub.php?mid=8325