CoD UO Modding Tutorial - Part 2 : Making a Simple Room, Texturing and Using the Camera

Now that the toolset is ready it is time to make our first map. By part 3 we will have a very simple room with textured walls, floor and ceiling in which we can play. But before we can add spawns to it we must build the room itself.

In CoD Radiant and CoD UO Radiant, structural objects are called brushes. To make a new brush that will be our room click in the largest box (the one on the left but not the far left) and drag out a square. The brush we have just created should appear in the top right box, the 3D window as a blue spotty slab.

Some of you will have already noticed that the diamond with two lines sticking out of it in the 2D view is the camera and what you can see in the 3D window is what that diamond would be able to see if it was alive. To see what our map looks like we will need to be able to manipulate the camera and move around with ease. The most important camera movement is the horizontal panning which can be done by holding down the right mouse button and moving around or by using the arrow keys on the keyboard. Panning with the mouse works in both the 2D and 3D views, but using the keyboard only works in the 3D view so I prefer to use the right click panning method. To zoom in and out in the 2D view drag the rollerball backwards and forwards as you would do in most applications with a zoom function. To pan vertically in the 3D view press and hold Ctrl and then right click and drag around.

From all that moving you will probably have realised that our brush is too flat to become a room suitiable for a CoD player to use and so we need to make it taller. When editing objects in the 2D view, you can click and drag from somewhere inside the brush which will move the object, or you can click and drag outside the object which will drag the sides of the brush. Experiment with this in the 2D view and you will find that you can make any shape floor you want but you cannot raise the walls and cieling. To do this you must click and drag outside the shape in the vertical window (far left). Click above the blue box with the red outline and drag so that it is about 128 high (a CoD player is about 64 high)

We now have a box, a solid box which we cannot go inside. To be able to go inside our room we need to hollow it out using the hollow tool. Click on this and the room will be hollowed with walls the same thickness as one grid unit. (The grid can be changed either by going to the Grid menu at the top or by pressing the number keys 1 to 9. Grid 1 is in increments of 1, Grid 2 is in increments of 2, Grid 3 is in increments of 4, and so it goes on in ascending powers of 2) You should now have a hollow room; move the camera inside it.

The Hollow Tool

In Call of Duty there aren't usually many spotty blue objects hanging around so we need to find some suitiable textures to paint our room. From the texture menu at the top we can select from many different texture sets that contain textures for all aspects of the game. For a basic room it is probably best to go for the Normandy texture set as it has a lot of general textures in it. We will start with the walls so select this subset and scroll down the images in the texture box (bottom right) until you find this very scruffy looking wallpaper.

You will now need to select the walls to texture. In radiant selecting is always done using Shift + Left Click. This works for multiple selecting too so select all of the walls and click on the texture in the texture window. Find suitable ceiling and floor textures from the corresponding subcatergories within Normandy and apply them to the ceiling and floor.

We have now made our first room in CoD Radiant, but we can not yet play it.

CoD UO Modding Tutorial - Part 3 : Spawn Points, Compiling and Testing