LE Ideal CK settings for Level Design

[Natterforme]

Ok, I have been looking at the tutorials and the wiki and the videos, but there seems to be, at least to me, a descrepency between what the level design videos say are optimal settings, and what actually works in the CK. I have been trying to add new structures by combining kit pieces from the same kits and I have been running into continuous problems. I have my settings for my pieces to snap to grid at 32 and snap to angle at 45 degrees. Yet, these settings seem to fail terribly. I often try to take piece, duplicate it, change it, then move along the grid. But the grid seems to change all of the time. I can almost never get pieces to line up perfectly and nothing will snap at a 45 degree angle. 90 doesnt work either. I have had to change the settings to around 5 or 10 degrees and even that still leaves gaps and over lapping seams. I have been bashing my head against the wall because none of this stuff seems to work properly. I know that it cant be as hard as it is making itself out to be but I know it is not entirely my fault.

 

Is there an option to snap to another piece along a side? For example, lets say I want to lay a duplicated piece of a wall directly at the edge of another wall of the same type. Why cant there be a hot key that will allow me to select a second piece and then be able to snap my new wall piece along one of the selected pieces sides? It seems like that would be a lot easier and faster than guessing about whether or not I am on connected to a piece all of the time.

 

Can anyone offer suggestions of settings that have worked for them?

 

-Natterforme

[eric31415]

After placing your first piece, did you make sure to set it's placement to 0 for the x,y,& z axies? If the first piece isn't lined up properly, snap to grid won't work as expected.

[ub3rman123]

I set my grid to 16 and angle to 15. Works perfectly. Additionally, pieces won't line up if you're not working with them at 90 degree angles. Press T and make sure that the piece is aligned with the grid.

[Natterforme]

What do you mean by setting the first pieces placement to 0?

 

-Natterforme

[Dragten]

I am using 16 and 45deg and have no problems whatsoever.

Make sure that these are actually turned on.

There is a button for each in the toolbar.

[Natterforme]

Tell me again why they didnt design the grid on a decimal system of ten? I might be American but at least metric makes sense.

 

-Natterforme

[Dragten]

Good question. The system works on 2^x.

2,4,8,16,32,64,128,256,512,1024,2048,4096 etc.

No idea why though. But it really makes no difference. You can set your settings to anything, be it 256 or 111, and it will work with that. You can also manually move things around. Its just that most set pieces have a certain length, width and height, so they can easily connect to each other.

[Natterforme]

How do you set the placement to 0 on the axis?

 

-Natterforme

[Dragten]

Double click the thing you have placed. You will see fields for both coordinates and rotation.

Set the coordinates to 0, obviously.

[Nnyar]

Those values also apply to textures materials and resolutions stretching is bad and come from the bsp box modeling days before static mesh legos. Use larger values like 128 256 for better snapping and 0 it out. generally use a value = to the piece you using.