Why can't UDK size's beeing in meters or inches??

[MetalHolic]

Hi, my name is Ruben a.k.a. MetalHolic.
I am trying to built stuff in udk but the problem is I now have a draw full with papers with all the size's of my maps.
And what mean is that I can't remember what size some things are, and I still can't get used to it.
So is it possible to set the udk size's to meters or inches??

Thanks for the help
( sorry for my bad English )
Hails from holland

[fighter5347]

No, it's not possible, but you can calculate it ^^ Just search on google for it.

[MetalHolic]

Great, more paper work
Thnks for the fast reaction

[mAlkAv!An]

If you make your own game it's completely up to you do define the scale you'd like to use (within constraints given by the engine).
According to UDN most UE3 licensees use a scale of 1uu=1cm which is in fact easy to work with.

If you want to test your map with UT3 bots things are different, however it's still possible to scale up the default bot size via script to make it match up.

[DGUnreal]

Unreal Engine is based on standard processor/software power-of-two values and not on metric or imperial measurements.
In any 3D software such as Blender or Max you should be working in Generic 1:1 units, not in metric or imperial.

There are some issues with attempting to use real scale and some basic scale generalizations that you can use.
If you are attempting to design everything architecturally to scale, forget it, the FOV and projection throw that completely off.
The best you can do is to get it close to real scale and to fudge those sections that do not look correct in-game. For example doorways are a bad spot.
This issue is intrinsic in most game engines.

When designing mesh objects it is usually best to stay with multiples of grid sizes, for example multiples of 16, otherwise meshes won't line up when snapped to grid.

Default Scale.
The default engine scale is 1 unreal grid unit = 2 cm.
This is the default scale and it is best to get used to working at this scale and with working in power-of-two values (1,2,4,8,16,32,64,128,256,...).
The engine world is 524288 (512k) units cubed, so a ~10km x ~10km x ~10km cube.
The default player mesh size is 96 units (= 192 cm = 75.5906 inches = 6.29922 feet or a 6.3 foot tall person).

Issue #1 - Using Meters.
There are 100 cm in a meter, so at 1UU=2cm, every 50 grid units is a meter.
The issue with attempting to using a 1 meter size is that the editor grid works on power-of-two values, so there is no 50 except at a grid spacing of 1.
I don't recommend attempting to work at grid sizes this small, it quickly gets very tedious.
The closest you could get would be 64 units to approximately 1 meter which is off by 28%.

Issue #2 - 1UU=1cm Scale.
The same issue occurs with attempting to use 1UU = 1cm.
A 1 meter size would be 100 units and the closest power-of-two value to that is 128, which is also 28% larger.
This scale is also twice as large as the default scale, so everything has to be built at a size of approximately 2x larger than actual or real size.
And the world cube is reduced to 5km cubed.

Hack #1 - Feet Scale.
You can get close to working in feet if you assume that 16UU is approximately 1 foot.
The actual size of 16UU = 16*2cm = 32cm = 1.04987 feet, which is fairly close to real.
Since 16 is an actual grid unit size, it is often fairly easy to ball-park your object creation scale in feet and then fudge it a bit if required.

[MetalHolic]

Thanks DGUnreal,
This is very helpfull.
But I still have 1 little problem.
When i make 2 worlds and want to put them together they have to Mach each other in size's.
Or is it wiser to use the technice they showt at the udk livestream?


*Again sorry for my bad English.

[fighter5347]

You can do it with level streaming, but it depens on how big the worlds are and how good the performance is. You have to use level streaming when you want to create open world maps (e.g like in Skyrim)

-either watch my level streaming tutorial: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MAKzeAFArt0
-or watch the one from the live stream ;D