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>> Welcome to Unreal's Tips and Tricks.
Today, we will be covering Unreal's modeling editor tools
with some additional tips for speeding up
your workflow in the engine.
I do want to note that these are evolving tools in beta that
will improve over time.
I'll be using Unreal 4.26 to showcase
the current possibilities with these tools.
To get started, you can go up to Edit in the top left hand
corner and select Plugins.
I'll go ahead and type modeling, and then the Modeling Tools
Editor Mode should pop up.
If this is not enabled, go ahead and check it
and restart your project.
To pull up these tools, I'm going
to go up to the Modes button, select Modeling.
And you'll see that a modeling window pops up
as well as some new toolbars here.
The Primitives is going to allow you to create simple geometry.
I'll go ahead and select Box.
You'll see that there are some parameters on the left hand
side.
I'll go ahead and place a simple box for now
and hit Complete at the top.
Now, you'll see that it has come into the scene.
You can also find it in the generated folder
down at the bottom in your Content Browser.
So I'm going to navigate through these folders
and find the box here.
You can change where this is being
saved by editing the Modeling Mode Quick Settings.
This can be found at the bottom of the modeling window.
Now, I'm going to go ahead and add in a cylinder as well.
You'll see that you have some additional options here,
such as radial slices.
It's going to change with each of the geometries.
I'll go ahead and bump this up to 64
and place it next to the cube.
Now, when I hear Complete, you'll
notice that those parameters go away.
So it is good to know that you want to make sure
that you have all of those settings set
before you hit Accept.
Once you do hit Accept, it's going to embed that information
into the geometry.
So you will not be able to have the ability to go and change
it, but you can change the scale, location, rotation
just as you can in the asset in your project.
I'm going to go ahead and align it
with the box set I have here.
Now, even though you can't change the geometry,
you will be able to start to layer some of these tools
in order to get shapes that you want and need.
So to showcase this, I'm going to select
both of these geometries, and I'm
going to come up to the Create tab.
And I'll select Mesh Boolean.
And you'll see that I have a couple different operations
here.
I'm going to filter through these now
to take a look at them.
We'll go ahead and select the B minus A.
And you'll see that you have some different output
options here, whether you want to create a brand new asset out
of it or perhaps apply it to the first object
you selected or second.
You also have the ability to choose whether or not
you want to keep those sources or delete them.
I'll go ahead and Accept.
Now, I'm going to take a look at some of these other tools.
I won't be going into them all, but I
am going to show you some of my favorites
that allow me to create quick geometry in Unreal.
So I'll select Polygon.
You see that a grid pops up.
So if you need a shape that's a little bit more custom,
you can come in here and draw your own shade,
and then extrude to where you would like it to be.
You can also use the PolyPath tool.
So say we want another wall in this space.
I can draw a wall, pick the size or the width of the wall
that I want, and then the height.
If you have exact dimensions, you
can also add it in here underneath Shape
in the modeling window.
I'm going to go ahead and hit complete on that.
And you'll see that the pivot is in the center
of the wall, which would be great for some needs.
But say I actually need the pivot to be at one
of the corners of the walls.
You can go into the Transform tab, select Edit Pivot.
And I'm going to hit W and move the pivot
to the corner of the wall.
You'll notice that a warning pops up on the left hand side.
This is letting you know that this is going
to change the original asset.
So if that pivot point is very important to keep and retain,
it might be nice duplicating the geometry.
And that's actually a really great workflow for the geometry
that you're editing using these tools to always make a copy
and duplicate.
So if you ever need to revert back to that original asset,
you have it.
So I'll go ahead and Accept here.
Now, there's another way that you could temporarily
change the pivot here.
And you can do that by holding down
the Alt button and your middle mouse button
and editing the pivot as needed.
So perhaps, let me raise it to the middle here.
In case I need to edit the wall of a certain height.
Once I finish editing the wall, I
can click out of the geometry, and then select the wall again.
And you'll see that it is going back to the pivot
that I set using the Transform Edit Pivot.
Now, I'm going to go ahead and set a material for this.
So on the right hand side, I'll type in Wall Paint.
Add that in.
And now, say I want to place this quickly
within the project.
An additional tip is using that middle mouse
button again, as well as the Control
button on your keyboard.
And dragging up or to the side, you'll
see that a line starts to pop up.
When I drag it up, it's going to take me to the top view.
So this means I can quickly filter
through different viewpoints as needed so that I can
align my geometry correctly.
See that?
It's not quite perpendicular.
I can rotate it here.
I can also hold down the middle button and drag.
And you'll notice that a number pops up.
This is a great little ruler so that you can always
check and see a certain size while you're
working in your model.
And I'll hold down Control and drag diagonally.
This is going to pop me back up into my perspective viewport.
Now, let's take a look at some other options
under the Transform tab.
You'll see that you have Select here.
This will allow me to edit some of the existing
geometry in the project.
You do want to make sure that you have the asset selected
that you want to edit.
So I'm going to cancel out of this, select geometry, hit
Select in the Transform tab.
And you'll notice that the edges of the triangles are here.
So that's going to help you know you're
working with the correct asset.
So I'm going to zoom in here, and I can actually
start to paint these triangles to select them.
I can also control the brush size
to make it larger, smaller.
I can hold down the Shift button to deselect
some of those triangles.
I can also use some of these selection
edit tools to grow or shrink my selection.
Now, there's a couple of different options of things
that you can do with the selection.
You can delete these triangles or invert the normals of them,
which can be very helpful if you've
brought in some geometry that has just one
plane with the wrong normal.
You could also detach and create a new poly
group of these triangles.
So that can be very helpful in editing geometry
that you have in your project without having
to go into the original model.
Now I'm going to show some of the possibilities of the Deform
tool.
To showcase this, I'm going to bring in a primitive shape.
I'll bring in this box here.
I'll hit Complete.
Now, I'm going to go back to the Deform tab
and I'm going to hit Displace.
You'll see that I have a couple different options that I
can filter through on the left hand side.
Actually, kind of like this sine wave tool,
so I'll go ahead and accept that.
And then I'm going to play around with the Sculpt tool.
So you'll see that I have some brush size options here.
You can start to sculpt the geometry.
I can control the size of the brush
by hitting S and D on my keyboard.
And you'll notice that the number on the left hand side
up here is changing as I do that.
I can hold down Shift, and it's going
to change the direction of the sculpting.
So I can go in and start to edit this a bit as needed.
I could also use the DynaSculpt tool,
which is going to liquefy that sculpting a little bit.
So you can really start to extrude different elements.
I'll go ahead and hit Accept here.
And you'll notice that the UV checkerboard morphs
with the geometry.
Now, this might be needed, it might be intended.
However, if you would like to change
that you can go into the UVs/Normals tab,
selective UV Projection.
And pick up the UV projection method that you prefer.
You could also unwrap.
So I'll go into AutoUnwrap, and then I'll hit Accept.
Now, these seams might not be ideal,
so you do have the ability to edit the seams.
You could take a look at the UV layout that you have.
There's a lot of different options here
that are going to allow you to have some control.
You could always go back and apply another sculpting tool
on top of it if you want to further edit
some of this information.
Now, these are just a few quick tips
for creating simple geometry in Unreal.
However, you can really start to layer some of these tools
in order to get geometry that you would like.
I hope that this improves your workflow
a little bit so that you can quickly edit or manipulate
geometry that you have in Unreal without having to go back
into the original program.
That's all we have time for today.
Thank you for watching.
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