When you open
UnrealED you are presented with four different views
The first time I opened a 3D editor (I was at
that time used to using BUILD) I was overwhelmed by all of the views and options. BUILD
was very simple and only used one view, so I was like "Man, this is whack, I don't
want to edit with all this crap when it could be so simple like BUILD" and promptly
ran away from the editor.
One thing is for sure, the editors are more
complex today. And one result of that is that you want to run UnrealED in at least
1024x768 to use it comfortably. There just isn't enough space for everything in anything
less.
The Views
As I show in the picture above, UnrealED has
four views: The Top View, the Front View, the Side View, and the 3D View. All of these
views (as I stated in the last section) are neccesary for editing because you cannot tell
more than two dimensions in a 2D view. If you are viewing something from the front, you
cannot see the depth, if you are viewing from the top, you cannot see the height. Because
of this, the multiple views are neccesary. The usage of these views is pretty simple. You
should keep them all looking at the area you are editing in, and position your object
using all three 2D views. Like when placing a cube, you can add it in the overhead view,
then adjust the dimension you cannot see in the overhead view, the height, in one of the
other two views. Then in the 3D view you can jot around and look at your creation in full
blown 3D as it would appear in the game. UnrealED is cool like that because you can see
everything as it would appear in the game from the editor. I think some Quake editors have
progressed along, but I remember when that was like a really neat feature for UnrealED to
have :) The 3D view serves an important purpose, as it is where you do all of your
textureing. It is also very important in spotting bugs and overall just seeing how things
look when you place them and compile.
Customizing your Views
While you can use UnrealED's setup for the
views, you can customize to how you please. You can choose which view you want in each
viewspace and resize the views. Look below for an example...
The use of these multiple views is very
beneficial to editing in 3D. With the proper desktop space there should be plenty of room
to work with.
UnrealED in 640x480 - Ouch.
So now you should see why having all of these
views is beneficial and required for editing in 3D. There are some other things you need
to think about when editing in 3D. They are covered in the next section... |
