Help with trying to make a cockpit (exterior)

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LDinos
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Help with trying to make a cockpit (exterior)

Post by LDinos »

Hello! 469c Unreal editor user here, I am trying to make a plane, and I need to make the cockpit, which is a very nice smooth cylinder-ish shape. I found out that the closest shape for a cockpit is to take a sphere, stretch it and then cut it in half. Here is how it looks:
Image


All good!...not.
Unfortunately, no matter what I try, the sphere brush tool with extrapolation 3 will never produce working brush. It will always be non-solid, sometimes it will even kill the player, no matter if it's solid/semi-solid. This happened even in a clean map at which I just made a sphere with no transformation at all. I even tried to "Snap vertices in to grid" with no success in fixing the problem and Transform Permanently didn't fix that either. (Maybe I should make an issue for that in oldunreal github?) I need your ideas and here's all the options I can think of:

- Produce the same shape with a different method (So far I have tried cutting a sphere in half with clip tool and making the brush by using Intersect. If there is any other way I can produce the same result, please let me know!)
- Make it non-solid and make invinsible brushes around it to make a fake collision for the cockpit (Really hard in my opinion, because semi-solid invisible hull 99% creates more problems than it solves; plus it's really hard to make an accurate collision shape of that with simple blocks)
- Give up and tell myself i'm useless because I can't fix a simple problem :)

Any ideas/solutions are very much appreciated!
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Barbie
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Re: Help with trying to make a cockpit (exterior)

Post by Barbie »

Sadly I cannot give you more solutions as you have found by yourself - I encountered the same problem in the map AS-Airporterror and MH-Airportterror(SB) where the cockpit is full of HoMs.
"Multiple exclamation marks," he went on, shaking his head, "are a sure sign of a diseased mind." --Terry Pratchett
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fudgonaut
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Re: Help with trying to make a cockpit (exterior)

Post by fudgonaut »

Don't know if any of this will help but:

1) Dont ever mix non-solid & semi-solid brushes. If they touch, you are guaranteed to get BSP problems in your map.
2) Instead of stretching a sphere, try stacking cone slices for the nose of the plane. I did this to get a zepplin shape:

slices.png
Each yellow arrow represents a brush I made with the cone tool. I used the brush clipping tool to cut cones into slices and stack them together. I'd recommend keeping the number of sides 16 or below.

You can put them all together and use the intersect tool to try and make a single brush (useful if you're going to make multiple airplanes) or just keep them separate

Some creative texture work might help hide ugly spots. Look at the airliner texture on this page.

If you applied a texture like that to the front polys on the airplane brush, then you could use Surface Properties > Alignment
Then use Wall Around X, Wall Around Y, or even Align To Floor to 'project' the texture over the nose of the plane.

Trying to make good looking curved surfaces is not easy in UnrealEd, but with some trial and error you can combine techniques to find a solution you're happy with.
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LDinos
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Re: Help with trying to make a cockpit (exterior)

Post by LDinos »

fudgonaut wrote: Tue Sep 06, 2022 3:02 pm Don't know if any of this will help but:

1) Dont ever mix non-solid & semi-solid brushes. If they touch, you are guaranteed to get BSP problems in your map.
2) Instead of stretching a sphere, try stacking cone slices for the nose of the plane. I did this to get a zepplin shape:


slices.png

Each yellow arrow represents a brush I made with the cone tool. I used the brush clipping tool to cut cones into slices and stack them together. I'd recommend keeping the number of sides 16 or below.

You can put them all together and use the intersect tool to try and make a single brush (useful if you're going to make multiple airplanes) or just keep them separate

Some creative texture work might help hide ugly spots. Look at the airliner texture on this page.

If you applied a texture like that to the front polys on the airplane brush, then you could use Surface Properties > Alignment
Then use Wall Around X, Wall Around Y, or even Align To Floor to 'project' the texture over the nose of the plane.

Trying to make good looking curved surfaces is not easy in UnrealEd, but with some trial and error you can combine techniques to find a solution you're happy with.
1) When it was solid, the whole plane would kill the player so I had to make that part only semi-solid :( In general though, yeah you are right
2) Interesting, I initially thought I could do it with cylinders but I didn't try with cone! I will give it a try, thank you!
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Re: Help with trying to make a cockpit (exterior)

Post by Buggie »

Make set of cutted cones.
You can get them via:
- Cone + cut half part.
- Circle in 2D editor + extrude to point + cut ttop (same as above).
- Circle in 2D editor + extrude to bevel.
- Radius projection in 2D editor + revolve it.

In fact last approach can be used for built entire cockpit:
scr_1662495858.png
scr_1662495858.png (8.74 KiB) Viewed 146 times
scr_1662495871.png
scr_1662495871.png (2.08 KiB) Viewed 146 times
scr_1662495883.png
scr_1662495883.png (4.96 KiB) Viewed 146 times
scr_1662495897.png
scr_1662495897.png (19.93 KiB) Viewed 146 times
scr_1662495928.png
scr_1662495928.png (227.5 KiB) Viewed 146 times
scr_1662496065.png
But from my test this stuff too deadly.

As last thing, you can left it deadly and fill with a lot BlockAll. And player able walk on it.
-

Automatically merged

Also I do similar stuff (fix deadly area).
Semi-solid cistern which is deadly, fixed by semi-solid invisible block.
scr_1662496633.png
scr_1662496646.png
scr_1662496658.png

Automatically merged

So you can use semi-solid half sphere and inside proper regular semi-solid blocks for not allow player center fall inside.
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