Welcome back, everybody. We are getting so close to starting our gray boxing process. But there are a few important concepts to talk about first that are going to help you immensely and this one is going to be all about building to the grid something I am constantly harping on my students to do because it is gonna make your Cray boxing life a lot easier if you choose to build to the grid. What is the grid? Well, what you are witnessing right here in my perspective, viewport is the grid, this white ish area with these lines, this is this thing called the grid and it is there to help you build more effectively and more efficiently. There is a place where you can actually turn off this grid if you don't want it which I don't know why you wouldn't.

If you click on this show button available in any viewport, you can simply tick that off to make it go away but I highly recommend that you leave it on. So what does this grid represent this grid represents all these squares represent a certain amount of unreal units. Again, one unreal unit equals one centimeter. So you can consider a six foot man to be about 183 unreal units tall. It's always important to remember your scale when you're building out your level, six foot man about 183 unreal units tall. In fact, it might not be a bad idea to place a geometry brush that is 183 unreal units high in your level so you can get that skill down.

Right now all of these different grid lines here these boxes each represent 50 unreal units that's 50 unreal units in this direction, and 50 in this direction. How do I know that? Well, right up here is my grid size that I currently have set units of 50 if I was to select this and set it to be 10, you can see that my gridlines suddenly got a lot smaller that because that's because each square is now 10 by 10. I typically like to build with my grid settings set to units of 50 or 100. Now when you do have your grid snap settings on, which I currently have right here, as indicated by this waffle icon turned orange, that means any actor that you are moving in your level, such as this box will move 50 unreal units at a time. You can see that it's not moving smoothly right.

If I was to turn my snap settings off by clicking on this, you would see that now I am not moving in increments of 50 so now If you have your snap settings on this will move by whichever amount you have indicated here. So if I change this to be 100, you can see that my grid changes to represent that. And now I am moving it in increments of 100. Again, I like 50 and 100 quite a lot. I'm going to jump over to an orthographic view at this moment. And I'm going to choose a top orthographic view to point out something, how you can go about building to the grid.

So right now I've got a geometry box brush out there, and it's 200 by 200. And each of my grid lines here is 50 by 50. But you can see that my box brush is not perfectly aligned to the edges of these grid lines. And I would like to do so because it makes building things a heck of a lot easier. How can I? How can I get this to be perfectly aligned with my gridlines here if I move it, it's just not enough.

Going, well, there's a hotkey command for that. So if you hold down the Control key, and then the end key, you will make your pivot point go right upon that intersection of the grid. So now you can see my gridlines are perfectly in line with the size of my brush here as well. So why this is cool is because if I was to bring out another box brush, drag and drop this out here. Now I can ensure that these are right up alongside one another without having to do any sort of like fine tuning in trying to make sure that they're Oh, so perfect, right, that makes life really difficult. So again, turn your snap settings on, do Ctrl plus n to snap it to the grid and it will snap it to the nearest grid line.

Now some something worth pointing out here is that not all pivot points for every app Actor are right in the middle of your actor like this, and I'm gonna bring out Starter Content, props chair, let me drag and drop this guy into the level. Now this one does have a pivot point right in the middle. But let's say that you wanted it to be along the edge, because let's say maybe you wanted this to be lined up nicely alongside of your boxes. For organizational purposes, I'm going to rotate it here. But I just can't quite get it to be right against my box right here, what you can do is you can actually move your pivot point. So if I was to hold down the Alt key, and my middle mouse button, that is my scroll wheel, you can actually move your pivot point.

Now you can see that it's jumping in increments of 50 right now, for the time being, I'm going to turn off my snap settings and move it very smoothly. And let's say I want to place my pivot point right about there. I'm happy with it right there. What I can then do is I can right click on this actor and choose pivot set as pivot offset, and it's going to remember that that is where I want to position this according to that pivot points. So if I click off of this, and click back on, it's going to remember that that is my pivot point. So at this point, I can hit control plus end, and it will snap this point to the nearest grid intersection.

That's pretty cool, right? Awesome. Um, what else is there to know is the measure tool if you hold down the middle mouse button, you can bring out a measurement tool to help you get the scale of your level down. Now a few things to note about the measure tool. Right now you're seeing it snapped to increments of 50 and it is only snapping to the various grid point lines. That is again, because I have snap settings on.

If I was to turn my snap settings off, I can then hold down the scroll wheel, that middle mouse button. And I can bring out this measure tool to see how long it is from point A to point B. When I'm using the measure tool, I typically like to have the snap settings off, but there are times that I like to you know, say, hey, how long is this distance from one end of this box to this brush to the end of this box brush, and sure enough, it's 400 unreal units. Note that the measure tool only works in orthographic views it does not work in your perspective view. So keep that in mind as you are working. Anyways, that is going to do it all for this discussion on building to the grid.

Again, building to the grid is a super efficient way to build out your gray box level in an efficient manner and to ensure that you don't end up with hideous overlapping geometry. ends up looking something like this human imperfections. That is going to do it all for this one guys. We will see you in the next one.