UnrealPolyEd: Easy terrain brush creation for Unreal and UT

[sidewinder]

Dear Unreal community,

I'm the author of the tool "MapScale 2.0", which you have already listed on your "list of essential tools for Unreal/UT scripting/mapping". Quite a while ago, I have created another useful tool for one of my mapping projects. Someone recently reminded me that it might be useful to officially release it and post a lik to it here. So that's what I'm doing now . The tool is called UnrealPolyEd.

The primary problem addressed by UnrealPolyEd is the missing brush editing functionality in the classical UnrealEd. This makes it particularly difficult to create somewhat realistic outdoor environments for "classical" Unreal, such as terrains. UnrealPolyEd solves this problem by providing a brush editor that is based on polygons with export functionality to *.t3d to allow importing the respective brush into UnrealEd.

The tool can be downloaded on my website:
Download: http://sidewinder.de.vu/unrealpolyed

I'd appreciate if you would add it to the list of essential tools if you think it's worth it.
Please direct any feature requests or bug reports to me via e-mail to [email protected].

Here's a screenshot of the tool:

[Doublez-Down]

Looks nice, but does it come with instructions?

[TigerTheGreat]

Yes, there is a manual included and it's quite extensive.

[Hellkeeper]

Hello Sidewinder.

You might not remember me, but I remember you.

Back in August 2008, I was working on my DM-Honored, which was a port of a failed layout I had built for UT2004. In the end, the map turned out to be average for UT99, but at least it worked.

In those days, I sent you a mail after stumbling upon your website to get MapScale, and this "PolyEd" thingy caught my eye. I sent you a mail to ask if I could take a look at it, because I was toying with the idea of making Honored a cave-based map (à la DM-Flux2 in UT2004), and you were kind enough to send me the software along with a small tutorial. I toyed with PolyEd for quite a while before deciding I would, actually, make Honored a fairly traditional concrete map and the whole cave stuff went away, and so I stopped using PolyEd.

Nonetheless, I remember it was quite a nice tool, and though, at the time, buggy as hell, it was functional and worked fairly well, as long as you didn't try something stupid. But it was just very hard to use correctly.

Also, it was fully German and I couldn't understand a word. At the time, you sent me version 0.3.0.0 built in 2003 (that is to say, it was a 5y/o German beta when you sent it to me back in 2008), and you asked me not to distribute it to anyone (and I didn't).

All of this to say: hey, very nice to see you back there when, at the time, you were working on some HL2 project. PolyEd was a very fun and nice tool to use, even despite all the shortcomings of the version I had. I'll take care to try this new version and see if it's better or not. Be assure that though I didn't use it in the end, it was very helpful.

As for DM-Honored, if PolyEd wasn't used in the end, the final version released in 2008 was the original layout from UT2004 scaled down thanks to... MapScale. So yeah, you helped me quite a lot back then.

[Jigoku]

MUST give this a try!

[[UDHQ]Jackrabbit]

Whoa, this tool kicks ass!

Great examples btw, the desert area and the "harry's castle" examples really show what this thing is capable of just from a 2d plane perspective.

Beats the living $*^t outta UnreaEd's 2d editor. Maybe I'll actually get around to an "all terrain based" singleplayer map for Unreal now. Titan valley.

[papercoffee]

Wow ...muß ich haben!!
Thanks for this great tool.

[sidewinder]

You might not remember me, but I remember you.

Yes, I do remember you. I was also able to find our correspondence in my mail archive. Great to hear you had some fun using PolyEd, even in the presence of (a lot of) bugs. I invested maybe a week of work time into the tool to polish it for this release, so there should be a lot fewer bugs around now and it also has many new features like undo/redo support. And it's now in English, including the tutorial

Great examples btw, the desert area and the "harry's castle" examples really show what this thing is capable of just from a 2d plane perspective.

Thanks. The Harry's Castle example is the terrain for one of the maps a friend and I created (it is called "HarryCastle2002". Actually I just realized that we never released it to the public, but I'll probably fix this now It's really a nice map and it's really fun playing with a larger number of players or bots.

Desert and WaterfallValley are from our "Stargate for UT" project and Peak is another outdoor map that never made it to the release.

If you have any feedback to UnrealPolyEd, then please let me know. For sure I can put some additional work into it if you are missing a specific feature (the ReleaseNotes.txt file that ships with PolyEd also contains some items I would like to implement/fix in the near future). Ah yes and I would like to create a video demonstrating how to use it

Thanks for the feedback and have some fun!

[ividyon]

I'm seriously impressed with your polishing work. I expected a more feature-complete and less "beta" software, but I did not expect an installer, a nice, fitting logo, a fully finalized and comfortable interface and even effort invested into making "tips of the day". This makes PolyEd one of the nicer tool releases I've seen; I'm a complete sucker for polish like this. Very well done!

I don't really map anymore, but when I come around to making a terrain, I'll definitely give this tool a shot. ^_^

[Dr.Flay]

Great to have you here Sidewinder. I have recommended your site many times.
It is good to see another active tool developer still supporting U1.

Many U-sites will love this as there is still plenty of mapping.

[sidewinder]

Great to have you here Sidewinder. I have recommended your site many times.

Nice to hear that, thanks!

It is good to see another active tool developer still supporting U1.
Many U-sites will love this as there is still plenty of mapping.

I'm also impressed that there are still so many active developers around for the classic Unreal.
Nice to see that the efforts I put into UnrealPolyEd help people to make better maps.

[Ozma777]

looks nice maybe I could use it for rocks and things, but no import....
means I can't use it for terrains. But at least I can flesh out the outside areas with custom rocks.

[Draco Nihil]

I've been using Nemesis's terrain builder to make my terrain in my maps, but I think I'm going to try your thing out.

By the way, why does your website use iframe's?

[sidewinder]

looks nice maybe I could use it for rocks and things, but no import....
means I can't use it for terrains. But at least I can flesh out the outside areas with custom rocks.

What kind of "import" would you need, I mean, which file formats? Maybe I can quickly add a function that suits your needs. I think a T3D import wouldn't be hard to do, but since you are currently limited to the "top view" in 2D, it's probably not so easy to model a rock in UnrealPolyEd. Maybe for such tasks, you're better off in a "real" modeling program.

By the way, why does your website use iframe's?

It's not using iframes, but frames. The site was created in 2002 and is plain HTML, no server-side scripting. So the simple answer is: it's a very outdated design and I never got the time to redo it from scratch, which would be definitely beneficial

[sidewinder]

It's not using iframes, but frames. The site was created in 2002 and is plain HTML, no server-side scripting. So the simple answer is: it's a very outdated design and I never got the time to redo it from scratch, which would be definitely beneficial

I just noticed that the page seems to be displayed incorrectly sometimes. If you see just some text and advertisements, but not the real site (which is ad-free of course), then please try to refresh the page. I guess the guys at .de.vu are to blame. I think it's time for me to get a "real" domain.