#ProBuilder "new" version

1 messages · Page 1 of 1 (latest)

brazen oxide
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Thread! 😄 Sorry, I'm too old to use Discord properly it seems. 40 as of a few days ago 😛

muted spear
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Happy birthday 😄. Threads are weird honestly.

This won't be the most intricate feedback but just my current impression of ProBuilder. I did a lot of csgo mapping via hammer in high school, completed a two year advanced diploma in game design and have shifted to programming since, Not in industry yet but getting there 😅.

Overall I just can't help feel that ProBuilder feels unreliable compared to what I want it to do and my previous experience in Hammer. I think this is more of a death by a thousand cuts situation more than one big glaring point but the two biggest actionable things I would mention are:

-For prototyping design ideas I commonly want to make placeholder models that go in prefabs. With the way ProBuilder saves the meshes this gets unstable where sometimes touching a instance of said prefab just causes the reference to the given mesh to die. The advice i've been given in the past is to export it to a mesh but addition to the workflow kind of ruins the iteration time value ProBuilder is meant to offer

-I don't know what I would exactly want here but when greyboxing levels I try (lol) to keep everything on a consistent grid scale. I find as soon as I start rotating copies of probuilder objects floating point stuff starts so ever so slowly muddy up the scenes grid consistency to where everything eventually starts to be very slightly off. I suppose it's probably because it's so much more limited in adjustments but I did not feel this experience with Hammer's brush workflow

brazen oxide
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Hey thanks for the detail, and the wishes 😄

  • I also came from Hammer, along with Karl, the co-creator
  • Yes, prefabs are a big area to solve for the new toolset. PB stores meshes in the scene, is the main issue there.
  • Also yes, the grid system in Unity is still pretty lack-luster. And PB isn't well integrated with it. A major point for the new toolset - grid-based tiling material that will dynamically match and change to keep you honest with grid-based creation! It's far too easy to keep digging down in detail when you should be staying at X units. Hammer is hardcore about this, maybe a bit much, but there's a nice middleground I intend to find.
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ProBuilder "new" version

lucid dirge
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I'm curious, why make a new one instead of updating probuilder?

Anyways, all you need to do is copy Source 2's hammer. With all of its features. Make it identical. It's the best level design tool that exists for any engine. It would be a massive boon for unity to have its own hammer. ProBuilder lacked a lot of its features, had a lot of bugs and was coded in an inoptimal way to begin with (for example, why have the meshes take up extra memory at runtime when you are never modifying them? could at least have made a toggle for that functionality)

Do not think of it as a tool for only making blockouts. Valve uses Source 2's hammer for the full end product. This tool should achieve the same goal (for basic blocking out probuilder does the job anyways, but it does not come close to actually making a viable level in the way that Source 2 does).

brazen oxide
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I don't work at Unity anymore, so new it is 🙂 Also, the old is deep in tech debt. New would be the best method either way.

tame panther
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Cool thread - My only in depth experience is trenchbroom(besides fully fledged dcc like maya/zb), but after taking a look at some hammer videos for source2, really impressive how fast complex shapes can be done. I second the motion to just copy its functionality 😄
I will say tb is really good for fast blocking (as I dont have hands on experience with hammer). My own desire for a tool/whatever successor to probuilder becomes is more focused on creating good meshes but also not allowing or doing better to prevent invalid meshes. I think Id rather have a tool fail to run vs it runs and creates a mesh that needs to be cleaned up.
I cant say I ever got really used to probuilder, I have too much experience with maya for full mesh creation, and found it too clunky for blockout situations.

brazen oxide
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Ok cool yeah tb is neat! Not heavily experienced in it, but I recall liking it. Gotta go back and dig. This iteration I definitely want to focus more on blocking than modeling. Speed and simplicity.

lucid dirge
brazen oxide
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I need to try it out first 😄 From what I've seen, it's honestly over the top for my plans. But I'm sure I'll find good inspiration there for sure.

lucid dirge