Skyboxes and
water are your two main reasons to know about zoning. There are other purposes you
can use zoning for though.
Speed
You can zone your maps into smaller sections for
speed. If you have a very large level, it would help the performance a lot,
especially on slower systems, if you split your level into smaller zones. Why this
is, is that a lot of CPU time is wasted on Unreal calculating what it has to draw on
screen, like what is in view. If your level is divided into zones and you don't have
some of those zones in view, then Unreal doesn't have to process all the stuff thats in
them. Unreal also has to process what actors are doing, where they are etc..
Things like 3d models, enemies, characters, etc. all take up CPU time, and when your level
is zoned off, not everything will have to be processed if you aren't interectiing with
those zones.
Properties like Lighting
Ambient Zone lighting can be very useful, to set
the mood of an area, or to set a "minimum" base light amount. Large
outdoor areas are hard to light right, and in reality you probably would not have spots
that are complete darkness, so an ambient light for the outdoor area would work nice.
In an indoor area however, you might not want any ambient light. Don't quite
get what I'm talking about?
To set the ambient lighting for a zone, add in a
ZoneInfo (Classes, Info, ZoneInfo) - If you already have a WaterZone or SkyZoneInfo class
in that zone, it will work, as it contains the properties for that zone. Add the
ZoneInfo to the zone you want to modify the properties of. With the ZoneInfo placed,
click on it, and go to its properties. Under the ZoneLight section there should be
three ambient light values. This works the same way as a normal light, except its
applied evenly to every surface in the zone. AmbientBrightness is the brightness of
the light, AmbientHue is the color, and AmbientSaturation is how pure the color is (see
earlier tutorials for lighting basics). You would probably never want to use an
ambient light brightness of over 32, I've heard some people say 8, but they most obviously
have a monitor brighter than mine, as 24 brightness seems about right for me for an
outdoor nighttime area at the fullest brightness setting I can set Unreal to. If
that person thinks its too bright, they can turn their brightness down, as mine cannot go
any higher (and a brightness of 8 is complete and utter darkness for me).
Heres the Deal:
Select ZoneInfo in the classes
browser, Place one in your zone
xZoneInfo Properties ->
ZoneLight, set the Ambient Lighting settings (3 of them) to give your zone a uniform
ambient light
You could use ambient light for many things.
Like maybe a level with a sunset in the background that emits a golden tone over
everything in your level. Or inside a volcano with everything having a lava-reddish
tone. You can see in the shot above that I split off a zone (for demonstration
purposes) and gave it a red tone, very bright (32), and very pure (0 saturation).
A bright ambiance combined with you adding faint
lights might cause your lights to be drowned out by the ambience tho, so be careful
Other Things
There are other things you can do with zoning,
and my friend Colin might do an advanced tutorial on that lately.
As for now, you know all the basic things you
can do with zoning. This tutorial is now complete. You can
download the tutorial map I made and look at it if you need any help figuring out how this
works.
Download zones.zip (21KB) - Example map of Zone Basics tutorial
The next tutorial is one that is optional, but
highly reccomended that you read. Create your own texture sets for your levels.
It isn't very hard. |
