I'm having problems with modelling an indoor level

[Cobra1 (Cobra!)]

I’ve been making a school level for a game I’m making (which is being made in Unity), and I’m coming across some problems with it.

I’m using a tile like system to make it, each room is a set of square tiles. For the most part, it’s been good, it’s made making the level much easier, I can easily create doorways and window gaps using this system.

When I go to test my level in Unity, the walls sort of intersect with each-other, and it slows down the game, and it looks really weird. Here’s a screenshot of what I mean:

To avoid this problem, I’ve been spacing out my rooms, and sort of extruding doorways to connect them, this eliminates the problem above, but creates another.

If I have a corridor, and rooms to the left of it, and I want to connect them all, and I have to space them all out to avoid the glitch above, the tiles for one of the rooms don’t align, unless I manually modify the room myself, which works as a temporary solution, but I can’t help but feel that would cause more problems down the line. Here’s what I mean:

I could just only do walls on one side, but if I were to go from a corridor to the cafeteria, obviously, the walls will be a different design/texture, so that wouldn’t work.

There’s also the problem with outside walls, the school has a big garden in the centre, so if I look out in a window, I want to expect to see the outside of another part of the school at the end of the garden. I have the exact same problem with the walls going through each-other, unless I really space them out.

Is there a way to make the walls not go into each-other but at the same time, have all the tiles align?

[Sanctuary]

If you want to keep your floor tiled , i think you should make the walls by extruding instead of using your method, with extruding the walls should not overlap each other , generating z-fighting as seen in the screenshot

What i mean :

You have your whole level made with tiles

Using the knife ( K ) and constraining it ( C ) you cut on that floor the wall boundaries

Then from there you select what will be the walls

And press E to extrude

Just remember to fix the Ngons

By joining ( J ) 2 vertices of those ngons

[Cobra1 (Cobra!)]

@Sanctuary

Using the knife ( K ) and constraining it ( C ) you cut on that floor the wall boundaries

Then from there you select what will be the walls

The Knife tool is really random, sometimes it works, it shows red dots and actually makes cuts, sometimes, it doesn’t. What’s causing that?

Also, the tiles I’m using are quite big, so the walls I end up making become far too thick! I can’t make the tiles any smaller, using the tiles as big as I am slows down my computer enough when I’m in edit mode, so making them any smaller I fear may crash the program or worse, the PC. Is there anyway to adjust where the cuts are, how far they are from another edge once it’s drawn? (but not finalised)

[Sanctuary]

The knife is unfortunately very buggy, very annoying i agree, i reported it there meaning that the devs are fortunately aware of the problems, and hopefully one day it will be fixed and 100% reliable.

But be sure to use the latest version of Blender, the new knife has got a lot of bugfixes since its introduction, using older Blender version means using a buggier knife.

I’m not sure what you mean by tiles far too big and slowing down your computer.
Are you using a subdivided plane (1 object) as in my example or are you the ground made of tons of individual squares put next to each other , meaning you use a lot of individual plane objects ?

Anyways, to adjust walls , juse select what you have cut

Press G then constraint it to the X or Y axis (by pressing X or Y) , in the screenshot example i constraint on the X axis and can move :

[Cobra1 (Cobra!)]

@Sanctuary

The knife is unfortunately very buggy, very annoying i agree, i reported it there meaning that the devs are fortunately aware of the problems, and hopefully one day it will be fixed and 100% reliable.

But be sure to use the latest version of Blender, the new knife has got a lot of bugfixes since its introduction, using older Blender version means using a buggier knife.

I’m not sure what you mean by tiles far too big and slowing down your computer.
Are you using a subdivided plane (1 object) as in my example or are you the ground made of tons of individual squares put next to each other , meaning you use a lot of individual plane objects ?

I’m using a single plane, but I’m using the array modifier to make it a grid of objects. My level’s pretty big, it’s about 110 squares both ways if I made the entire level the one grid, so going into edit mode takes a while to load, and when it’s in edit mode, the framerate goes way down, sometimes as low as 5 fps, and I have a high-end PC, worth £1200 (£1,168).
I have everything saved on my memory stick as well as a portable version of Blender (both that and my desktop have the latest version, 2.67b), so I can work on my models in college, or wherever I go that has a computer. If my high-end PC can barely handle it, then the computers in my college and other places aren’t going to survive it!

I can’t do much with the level with a buggy knife, I’m going to have wait until Blender fixes it, for now, I guess I’m going to have to stick with the level I already have.

[Artistic]

@Cobra!

I’m using a single plane, but I’m using the array modifier to make it a grid of objects. My level’s pretty big, it’s about 110 squares both ways if I made the entire level the one grid, so going into edit mode takes a while to load, and when it’s in edit mode, the framerate goes way down, sometimes as low as 5 fps, and I have a high-end PC, worth £1200 (£1,168).

Sorry to put it this way but a computer is not defined by how much you paid for it but by its technical specs. And Blender or any other software to do 3D design will suffer the same problems if you you have millions of quads displayed on your screen. 110 squares is not a measure unit , see how many faces or quads are being used by your model and you will see why your PC is struggling to cope. There are tricks to help improve that, like splitting your level in separate layers, or hiding parts that you don’t work with or more if you look around. People who sculpt high poly models will be able to help you handle your design better.

[Cobra1 (Cobra!)]

@Artistic

Sorry to put it this way but a computer is not defined by how much you paid for it but by its technical specs.

I’m know, I bought the PC because of it’s specs, it can run all the latest games on high settings at 60fps, I would go into detail with the specs, but it’s pretty irrelevant to the subject. I mentioned the price because I thought it would give a good idea how fast it is.

I’m saying usually, I can notice a difference in performance between computers, some I’ve tried have no problem with handling the levels I build without slowing down, but others can’t handle it at all unless it’s in wireframe mode.

Even my PC can hardly handle the level I’m building in solid/textured mode, there’s no way other PCs will survive it.

@Artistic

And Blender or any other software to do 3D design will suffer the same problems if you you have millions of quads displayed on your screen. 110 squares is not a measure unit , see how many faces or quads are being used by your model and you will see why your PC is struggling to cope.

110 squares is not a measurement, no, but each square is a single plane, which is 1 face, or 2 polygons/tris. So that means the level has 110 faces or 220 polygons each way (which totals to roughly 10,000 faces, or 20,000 polygons just for the floorboard! That’s before adding walls, and ceilings. 3 floors worth!), that is what really matters when it comes to performance.

If I were to make it all 1 grid, than I could no longer take rooms out to save space in certain levels in the game to save memory and optimise it to run on older systems. I think I’ll compromise, I’ll use the knife method (Once it works properly, I’ll do what I can for now) for making walls, but keep separate rooms.

[Cobra1 (Cobra!)]

@Sanctuary

Just remember to fix the Ngons

By joining ( J ) 2 vertices of those ngons

The vertices joining doesn’t seem to work anymore, it used to work every time I did it, but now if I press J with 2 ngon vertices selected, nothing happens, and if I press space and use the join command by looking for it, I get an error saying “This data does not support joining in edit mode”…

I know I can just delete the face and make 2 faces out of it, but doing it this way (whenever it works) is way more convenient and saves a lot of time in comparison, so I’d like to know what’s causing this problem and if there’s anything I can do about it?

[Sanctuary]

Try this :

• Select the ngon face (and the few ones next to it) that is refusing you to join 2 of its vertices, invert the selection (CTRL+I) and delete.
• Try again to join 2 of the vertices from that ngon face

If it still refuses to work, upload the blend (the one with only the ngon face giving problem and the few faces around it), so someone can give a look to see if that’s a bug that then would need reporting, i never experienced this problem myself as it has always worked when i wanted to join 2 vertices of a ngon.

[Cobra1 (Cobra!)]

@Sanctuary

Try this :

• Select the ngon face (and the few ones next to it) that is refusing you to join 2 of its vertices, invert the selection (CTRL+I) and delete.
• Try again to join 2 of the vertices from that ngon face

If it still refuses to work, upload the blend (the one with only the ngon face giving problem and the few faces around it), so someone can give a look to see if that’s a bug that then would need reporting, i never experienced this problem myself as it has always worked when i wanted to join 2 vertices of a ngon.

It didn’t work for me…

Here’s an example .blend I made:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/6oq1py0rueydne7/Level%20Problem.blend

I’ve also left some space around the level to test the knife tool, which doesn’t work for me anymore…

[Sanctuary]

Thanks, now i see, indeed that’s a big bug and i will report it , 1st time i ever saw this and i model with Blender a lot.

I isolated the problematic face only in this blend in which the joining does not work on the ngon.
http://www.pasteall.org/blend/22347

Oddly, if i export this blend to OBJ and re-import it into Blender, it works, the joining i mean work again (so you may want to try this with your model to get back the ability to join vertices in a ngon)

But to make the report actually usefull you’ll need to add some information as i’ll give the link to this thread on the report :

• what version of Blender have you used ?
• have you imported anything into this scene ? a .obj a .fbx or anything else ? i suspect something has been imported as i remember now a problem that had been reported in the past with face that were like “ghost” when being imported from another file and could be related to what you’re having there.
• how exactly have you build this ? what steps , that’s important for the devs to reproduce, is that just a subdivided plane and you extruded or have you done something else too ?

[Cobra1 (Cobra!)]

@Sanctuary

Thanks, now i see, indeed that’s a big bug and i will report it , 1st time i ever saw this and i model with Blender a lot.

I isolated the problematic face only in this blend in which the joining does not work on the ngon.
http://www.pasteall.org/blend/22347

Oddly, if i export this blend to OBJ and re-import it into Blender, it works, the joining i mean work again (so you may want to try this with your model to get back the ability to join vertices in a ngon)

But to make the report actually usefull you’ll need to add some information as i’ll give the link to this thread on the report :

• what version of Blender have you used ?
• have you imported anything into this scene ? a .obj a .fbx or anything else ? i suspect something has been imported as i remember now a problem that had been reported in the past with face that were like “ghost” when being imported from another file and could be related to what you’re having there.
• how exactly have you build this ? what steps , that’s important for the devs to reproduce, is that just a subdivided plane and you extruded or have you done something else too ?

-I’m using 2.67b, which I believe is the latest version
-I don’t recall importing anything, but I export it to .fbx a lot to test the level in Unity.
-Here are the steps I take to make the level the way it is:

1. Add a plane to the level.
2. Apply 2 array modifers to the plane, one for the X axis, one for y. Both having “Merge” selected, so all the varticies join up. Turning it into a grid of sorts. I also apply a tiled texture to the plane before applying, if that makes a difference.
   3.Use the knife tool (whenever it works) in the centre of a plane where the cornet of the room will be, then make a square out of it, then apply.
3. Move the newly made lines outward by 0.75 (that’s what I type, not sure what measurement Blender uses, if any). I do this by taking each side, and moving them out by typing the number, I don’t scale the whole thing.
4. Extrude the outer faces by 3, then if I wanted any more floors, I extrude by 0.11, again by 3, and repeat. (3 for each floor, 0.11 between each floor)
5. Attempt to join the 2 vertices of the Ngons.

That’s probably too detailed, but I hope it’ll do.

I hope the join and knife tools get fixed soon, because right now, as they are, I can’t really do anything to my game, the levels are really all that’s left to make, as the gameplay and characters are all done.

If anyone working for Blender reads this, please try and fix these as soon as youse can, I also have a small request, is it possible to have the option to have the knife tool snap to the centre of a face/plane? It would really come in handy for me.

[Sanctuary]

Thanks, i’ll fill a bug report and gave the link to this thread so the devs can find the informations you have given about how this very odd bug could be reproduced.

Meanwhile, try to export your blend in OBJ format and re-import it in Blender to see if it fixes your problem (as it does on the stripped down blend took from your blend i posted)

[Sanctuary]

Posted the report there with a link to this thread :
http://projects.blender.org/tracker/index.php?func=detail&aid=35886&group_id=9&atid=498

[Cobra1 (Cobra!)]

@Sanctuary

I isolated the problematic face only in this blend in which the joining does not work on the ngon.
http://www.pasteall.org/blend/22347

That’s odd, the join tool works fine with me on that blend, this is quite a strange bug…

@Sanctuary

Posted the report there with a link to this thread :
http://projects.blender.org/tracker/index.php?func=detail&aid=35886&group_id=9&atid=498

Cool, I hope this problem, as well as the knife tool bugs, get resolved…

[ideasman42]

Hi,

This isn’t something we can support,

• z-scale: 0.000000000001,
• z-dimension of the mesh has been compensated for the scale to: 3000000577536.0

We don’t enforce limits on scale but once you start dealing with numbers like this computers loose accuracy (with regular floating point numbers).

solution - apply scale.

[Cobra1 (Cobra!)]

@ideasman42

Hi,

This isn’t something we can support,

• z-scale: 0.000000000001,
• z-dimension of the mesh has been compensated for the scale to: 3000000577536.0

We don’t enforce limits on scale but once you start dealing with numbers like this computers loose accuracy (with regular floating point numbers).

solution - apply scale.

I’m sorry, I’m not sure what you mean by “apply scale”? You mean apply an animation keyframe? Or something else?

[Sanctuary]

Select your model in Object Mode and press CTRL+A -> Rotation/Scale , to apply rotation and scaling that you have done in Object mode

[Cobra1 (Cobra!)]

@Sanctuary

Select your model in Object Mode and press CTRL+A -> Rotation/Scale , to apply rotation and scaling that you have done in Object mode

Oh, it seems to work now! It also seems to have fixed the knife problem, before applying, the knife didn;t cut the mesh, now it does! It’s prefect for a temporary solution. I hope they fix the tool properly, though.

Now I can finally finish my levels and my game! Thanks!

What does the “applying” the rotation and scale actually do, though? I didn’t notice any difference on the actual model.

[Sanctuary]

Add a Cube in Object Mode, press N and look at this :

Go to Edit Mode , rotate and scale the cube, then go back to Object Mode, notice how those values are still at 0 for roation and 1 for scale.

Now stay in Object mode, roate and scale the cube, notice how those values have changed.

Press CTRL+A -> Rotation&Scale and see those values “applying”, going to 0 and 1 respectively.

Those rotation and scale numbers have a big influence for some of the modelling tools, sometime desired but sometime unwanted, if you look in the support threads, from time to time some report having a problem having a tool working on a model despite it had worked before, and very often the solution is :

• remove double
• recalculate normals
• apply rotation&scale