Level building

In the list of things to learn, here's a pretty good one. Terrains and static meshes are one thing; but how do you build a level?

Introducing the BSP brush! This building brush comes with several preset shapes (primitives like planes, cube, spheres, but also straight stairs, curved stairs...); you just select the different sizes you want (by right-clicking on the shape - that sounds obvious, but I could only figure it out by reading the official doc), and then adding the surface (and since you can add, you can also substract - pretty interesting and offers good creative possibilities).

And that's not it! With this tool, you can also add special volumes: water volumes, physics blocking volumes, but also level streaming volumes, ladder, gravity... Overall a pretty easy to use and very powerful tool.

So far, the only problem I faced when using this tool was the fact that you have to drag the brush around to go where you want your volume/surface to be created. It sounds ok, but when you have a really big volume and you want to align the edges with some other surface, for instance, it gets pretty painful.

After several hours of slow progression, here's a screenshot of my first level with the BSP brush. There are regular surfaces, some with materials on them, a skybox (waaaa) and a water volume with a transparent plane on top featuring an animated water material (so pretty! also kinda inadapted to the scenery I was building but oh well ;)). And some stairs. I like stairs.

My dreamhouse