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Reconstruct
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Make Something Unreal Contest Winner
2nd Place, Phase 3
Best Level With Original Content |
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Download (6.65 MB)
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Description
Rome wasn't built in a day. Modern cities, however, have the luxury of nanite construction.
This map was originally included in Volume 1 of the Community Bonus Pack 2, and includes the song "Extinction Clinic" by Bexarametric. Used with permission.
Video
Screenshots
Tutorial
I've gotten a lot of email from people asking me how I did the Reconstruct Effect, and I've seen a lot of theories floating around out there. Actually if you open the level up in the editor it should be pretty obvious how I did it, but I've decided to write this step-by-step document.
The first thing I did was make the basic layout of the level completely out of bsp, and temporary movers for the Reconstructs (1 or two gigantic ones for each area). After I had given the layout to my alpha testers and made sure it was good to go, I went to work putting in the final version of the Reconstruct Effect. Let's take a look at this example bridge that I'm going to recreate:
The highlighted area is where the bridge will be. First I created the pieces that would fill in the area using Max.
Four random pieces to give me some good variation. I placed one instance of each mesh off to the side of the bridge and began filling in the area, alternating the piece I duplicated as I went along.
Once the entire area was filled in, I replaced my four source meshes off to the side with Movers and set their Object >> InitialState to TriggerControl. For each piece of the bridge, I duplicated a mover and placed it inside the blocks at the ends of the bridge, in their starting position. Then I right clicked the mover and hit Mover >> Key 1 and moved it to the same place as the mesh it was replacing.
Once the mover was in place I reset it to Key 0 and deleted the static mesh it was replacing. I repeated this for the entire bridge, switching the mover's starting positions to the opposite side of the bridge as I passed the midway point.
Once all the static meshes were deleted, the mover keyframes were done. I deleted the source movers off to the side. Now it was time to place the triggers. I set all the movers to key 1, then I added a trigger and placed it directly over the first mover and did a few experiments. I adjusted the radius of the trigger and the MoveTime of the mover (which ended up being 0.15 seconds) until I was satisfied there was no way to move fast enough to get through it, then set all the movers to the same value. During my experiments I noticed that the movers tended to 'catch' me and pull me with them, so I went back and lowered all of them in Key 0, then raised them to their normal position for Key 1. That way they would have to move up some distance before you actually touched them, and this stopped them pulling me around.
After that I adjusted the height and CollisionHeight of the trigger so that I couldn't duck far enough to fall through, and no matter how high I fell from the mover would still catch me.
Once I had the right values I duplicated that trigger and placed it over the center of the other movers.
Now it was time to link up each trigger with its mover. This was the most tedious part of the whole process. I decided on a naming convention before I started to make the whole thing go a lot faster, then got to it. For example, for the first bridge I used the Event and Tag of Bridge101, Bridge102 etc. For the second bridge, I used Bridge201, Bridge202 etc. I set all the movers to Key 1 and went through setting the Event of the trigger and the Tag of the mover, reseting the mover back to key 0 so I would know that I had already set that one up.
After all the Events and Tags were set, the Reconstruct was done! Only one more bridge, three walls and seven floors to go! When I made the level I did them all simultaneously for each step, and the entire process took me three solid days of only working on the Reconstructs.
For optimization purposes, I created an antiportal surrounding each section of Reconstructs in their starting positions, so that when they were retracted they would not be rendered. With the small bridge alone being 2100 polys, it helped keep the poly counts low.
One last thing to take care of, getting the bots to use them. For this, I simply fooled them into thinking it was a normal elevator, setting the two LiftExits and a LiftCenter normally, and picking a random Reconstruct towards the middle to use for the LiftExits and LiftCenter's settings.
Yay the bots understood them!
I hope you enjoyed reading this small tutorial and have gained some small insight into my noodle. Feel free to use this effect in your own level, if you have the patience for it. Good luck!
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