Basics of grey boxing

Basics of greyboxing

So you want to learn about greyboxing? Greyboxing is a key fundamental in game development and design and is a great place to start if you are new to game development. I have a good amount of experience with greyboxing and will walk you through the basics i have learned and teach you how to do the same in unreal engine.

Getting started

At this point you should have a project created in unreal and some basic layout of your map. If you do not have any of that you can read my other blog post about how to get started in unreal. Just to recap to start you have to drag in a shape you would like and create a floor, wall or ceiling by adjusting the size of it. Then from there you finish off your room or areas basic layout.  Now from here there are many things you can do with grey boxing in unreal such as create doorways, stairs,  debris and so on. I will be going over a few of these just to get you started.

Doorways

To create a doorway first you have to choose a spot in your walls that you would like a doorway to be created. Once you have the desired spot drag in a cube or other desired shape of door from the geometry section on your left and size it to be the width of your wall(x or y depending on how wall was placed and sized). Then make the doorway width (the opposite width of your doorway could be x or y) and height the desired size. Now you can choose to do this before you size or after it does not matter, but to create the actual door way you must scroll down on the right hand side of your screen where all the information for the shape is and find the drop down that says add and change it to subtract. now the part in the wall where you placed your shape should be empty. If not then make sure your width matches the width of the wall.

Stairs

To create stairs first you must find an area where you would like to put stairs into your map. Once you found the spot you want to work with drag a normal or curved stair case, depending on what fits your map best, into your map. From here make sure your stairs line up with the floor and or wall they are next to and leave no empty space because it would not look that good. Now there are many different settings to play around with stairs other than just the normal x, y, and z sizing. These include num steps, stair height, stair length, and stair width. These can add or subtract the amount of steps you have, how tall each step is, how long each step is, and how wide the steps are respectively and will adjust the size of the staircase with each change. You can play around with these settings until you have reached your desired staircase look. A pointer though, do not make your steps too high because your character would not be able to walk over them smoothly and would have to jump. 

Debris or Impassable spaces

To create debris or impassable spaces first find an area where you would not want your character to be allowed to go. Once you have the desired area you can drag in any type of geometry you want and resize it according to your liking. Some tips would be to make it tall enough to the character can not jump over it and try using more than one shape because one shape looks very plain and simple. Now if you think your debris just looks weird being too big or you just do not want a character to access that part of the map yet but a do not want a debris there there is a way around this. If you go on your left and click all classes you can search blocking and something like blocking volume will pop up. You can drag that in and it works the same as any other geometry in the way that you can size and shape it however it fits your needs. The blocking volume will just plain out not allow a character to go through it. it is also invisible so you can place it at parts where your debris does not cover and now the character wont be able to maneuver around it. Keep in mind that debris could even just be used as cinematic things such as chairs, tables, or anything else that you would like your world to have laying around.

Now that you have some greyboxing basics underneath your belt get crazy and let your imagination run wild. You can practically do anything you want in a world. Add more rooms where your stairs lead or make the areas that your doorways lead too. Just keep one last thing in mind make sure that you do not let any geometry or volumes you drag in overlap each other as this will cause problems later with texturing a map.