How To Make A 3D Level In 15 Minutes

in this tutorial we're going to talk about how to create 3D environments uh adding texture adding lighting using a blockout um just the basics of making a 3D game uh these exact principles I use in my game Twisted Tower and this is how it looks I feel like it looks pretty cool and so I'm going to teach you how where we did that at least the basics of what we did here okay so you want to go to package manager and make sure you've installed probuilder in from the unity registry just type it in probuilder and and we're going to open up our probuilder window tools there it is probuilder window I'm going to drag it over here all right so if we create a new shape here and I just draw it like this you notice I have like a flat plane here which is cool I can grab the faces here and I can actually extrude them by holding shift like this is that cool so you can start to realize oh I can make a whole level doing this

right the problem with this method is that it's random and we're not utilizing a grid size a grid size is going to help us make sure our our jump height our move speed our enemy move speed our pickups our Ray casts all of it is linked to the grid size so that the level design is directly linked to the gameplay and they work work in Tandem and so your job when you're starting a project is to figure out do my mechanics work with the grid size does my jump Height work with the grid size does My Player move speed work with the grid size because we're going to snap to that grid I'm going to go ahead and make sure my y grid is turned on okay I'm also going to make sure that my snapping is turned on now if you can't see that just make sure you set um this to Global okay if it's on local you can't turn it on

you have to have it on global so now we can turn our snapping on and we can set it to in my case I'm going to use four you can pick whatever you want I'm going to pick four I think that works great for us okay and also our increment snapping is set to point2 what does that mean it means that I can increment by 0 2 if I hold control this will all make sense I promise this will all make sense just hang tight with me okay so what I'm going to do is go to new shape here now there's a bunch of tools here don't get overwhelmed we're only going to use a few I'm going to make sure that my height cuts and my width cuts down here are set to zero because all I want to do is create a square this is all I want to create and we're going to build an entire level off of this one quad I'm going to grab my face selection tool and if I hold shift as long as snapping is turned on if I hold shift I can strud

popop popop popop oh I'm starting to see what's happening here maybe you don't hang tight bpop bpop bpop okay what's he doing sometimes the selection is kind of weird with uh Pro Builder there we go BP BP pop H well that's not a level that's a big block if I select all my faces here and I grow my selection like that watch what I can do this is going to change everything flip normals here we go and now what do we see an interior now that's not amazing okay because frankly it's just a box with inverted faces but what do we see here

we see an interior shrink our field of view here we see an interior with a grid a perfect grid and we're going to use that to just create a whole level so this setup is the foundation to any gr interior at least using our method that we use in Twisted tower now one of these faces here is not filled in so I'm going to fill in this fill hole there we go now if we enter play mode here I'm going to turn on our ambient lighting we don't use ambient Lighting in our games but I'm going to do it for the purposes of this little mini tutorial now if I enter play mode here you'll see what it looks like so we're going to use this first person controller so now we have an interior the the exciting part is the grid because we can use the grid to create a ton of cool stuff so I can select these two here and boop boop boop now don't do

this don't hold shift and just pull cuz we just lost the grid see that the grid is no longer there you do it one at a time got a cool hallway here hey what if we do a little closet here well that's easy simple closet you could just do this maybe make it elevated right here now it looks like crap but you guys are going to be shocked how quickly you can make it look like not crap with texture and we're going to talk all about texture [Music] okay everything great everything great every piece of art that's great tends to start with it being good in the abstract first and then you tighten the screws later so the same is true with um

blocking or building a level you start with the most abstract form possible in this case this very simple blockout and then you scale on top of it once you like the design um okay so textures textures textures textures um so I've gone ahead and found some textures um because I didn't want to bore you guys with sourcing textures but I got a lot of textures from uh from Google just just because we're we're not making a commercial game here we're just doing a tutorial so I Googled a lot of them and then I also got some from textures.com okay we've got a plaster with a normal map we've got a wallpaper we've got a wood floor with a height map and a normal map and a roughness map we'll talk about that in a sec we've got a wood panel height map normal map roughness map if I double click on them you'll see that they're psds look at this isn't this cool our PSD has all these color adjustments right I could disable this and save it really quick and it'll update on the fly in unity I could put a smiley face on it right and

it would update on the fly in unity all of these textures are the same freaking size this is this is so important um if they're all the same size then they can all use the same tiling and unwrapping we'll talk about it in a sec but all the same tiling and sizing on that probuilder mesh so it's just quickly dragging and dropping okay on that prob Builder mesh but you got to make sure they're all the same size all right now we have normal maps and just to briefly go over this normal maps are just a a creative way um to sort of code elements of the texture to make it look 3D so certain dark parts of the blue are going to look darker because of lighting the lighter parts are going to look lighter so it makes things look 3D on the texture without actually making the mesh 3D okay I'll show it to you in a sec here but you can see the normal map

for the floor as well it has this weird blue coloring okay so let's just go ahead and drag a material into the scene let's just do a plaster all right so it looks horrible right and we're going to select by let's see here select by material and I opened up my UV editor here don't worry about this it looks completely chaotic and confusing for those of you who don't know how to unwrap things and that's okay all we're going to do now is we're going to click this beautiful little button now it depends on what your grid size is but in our case it's four so we're going to set the tiling to four and now look how beautiful our plaster is perfectly mapped to our world it's so simple but let's make it look prettier okay so the way we assign texture on a probuilder mesh is we

have to select the faces okay so if I go to top view here I believe I can just do this right so let's grab our floors let's assign as long as everything's selected here let's select that one so we need to make sure we're double checking here looks good to me let's go ahead and throw our wood floor on there oh not bad let's go ahead and bring in our wallpaper hey check that out okay but it's really really boring right and so what you can do is you can cut up your walls to have very um well I mean just look around you in my own office for example I have half of my wall as one texture and then the top half is

another so why not just do that here so let's see if we can select a face ring here nope a face Loop there we go yay okay we got the face Loop of the entire bottom we'll also select this one as well and uh what we're going to do is we're going to take this entire selection and we're going to drag on a new texture that's going to be sort of that uh lower half wall and we'll make it wood so we're going to do a wood panel see guys and this is just a texture from textures.com but because everything sized properly they all have the same exact sizing it's so much easier to just drag them in but um let's just create a point light here I'm going to press control shift F and it'll be right here I'm going to turn off our environment lighting because it sucks and we're just going to create a highly intense Point light here look how spooky Okay so this this would be great

if you're making a horror game Let's warm it up a little bit and as you can see now we've got normal maps showing up really clearly okay normal maps are it's what makes this look 3D guys and there's a shine too and that shine can only be generated that specular information is only there because it has a source so this ceiling doesn't look to me like a normal ceiling normal ceilings you usually have some kind of a trim on the top okay look around your office or your school if you're in school right now or um your apartment or your home and you'll find that you've probably got trim somewhere now like a cheaper house and I'm even looking at mine mine doesn't have trim at the top trim makes it look a little bit better okay so let's add a trim piece and this isn't even 3D guys this is just a cut and a new texture pay attention pay attention because what I'm about to show you is

very difficult to grasp but what you want to do is you want to select the perpendicular line to the trim so I can select any of these I can select that one or this one or this one whatever's perpendicular to the trim which is going to be this way and then I click insert Edge Loop let me move my face here insert Edge Loop oo do you see it now so now I can move it up to various locations now this is why incrementing is so important I've got snapping of four see that and I also can have snapping in increments of Point 2 and I can go to the top here and then go down and now I can select this Loop and drag in a wood

panel to create a trim see super duper simple I'm in a creepy Mansion see so this is how levels are made this is how they start and and this is true honestly guys for me I found that this method works great for exteriors too thank you for watching and just remember if you want to go deeper into the development side of making a game and we'll also talk about the terrain tool and create beautiful simplistic terrain out exterior environments uh there's a link below to a workshop it's going to take you through how to make a 3D game in 15 minutes uh it's totally free my treat to you uh can't wait to see you there cheers