Hello everyone in this video we are going to be talking about view modes and show flags. And what I am specifically referring to are these two buttons across the upper left hand portion of any viewport in your level editor. Currently, I am looking through the perspective viewport, which is this beautiful view right here. But notice that if I were to bring on the orthographic views as well, this four pane view that these two buttons are present on any orthographic viewport window as well. So let's go ahead and talk about these a little bit. Starting with our view mode button right here and you can see the list of options when you click on it.

By default in your perspective view, you are in lit mode and this is what the scenes going to look like with normal lighting. So for any lights that you place around your scene, it is going to give you an accurate depiction as to what that level will look like when you jump in and play on the mode, and I'm just going to select this right away, and this is what your scenes going to look like. If all of your lights aren't actually being rendered. You have this sort of flattish look about your level. Now, why might you ever want to work in unlit mode? Well, there may be times when you are placing objects around your level where the lighting can actually make it more difficult to play things around like you want.

So unlit mode may work better for you in those circumstances. You also have wireframe mode, which you have seen in the previous video. By default orthographic views are in wireframe mode. And this is really super useful for pinpoint placement of objects. And it's also kind of a neat diagnostic tool just to see how many polygons make up certain meshes in your level. You can see that we've got polygons galore out here because we have our landscape Present, and too many polygons equals slow rendering.

So maybe this is a way that you can decide or see for yourself as to like, hey, that's got way too many polygons, maybe I should think about eliminating some of those. Jumping back to our different view modes, you've got things such as detail lighting, which currently looks something like this. You've got lighting only. This is with no textures. You've got reflections, which currently looks kind of cool like this. Now, why would you use any of these other three view modes, these are often used to help diagnose problems.

Oftentimes, artists will use these go into these views to help diagnose like, Hey, where is lighting being a little too complex in our scene and where might we need to eliminate some lights just as a brief example. So by and large, most of the time, your view modes that you will be wanting to be in Your lit mode, your unlit mode or your wireframe. You can see that there are hotkeys associated with jumping into any of these modes, I typically just click on the button and select whichever mode I want. But for those of you that really enjoy hotkeys, they are available as well. Next thing to talk about is our show flag button. So what is this if I click on it, you're going to see a whole bunch of checkboxes.

Some of them checked, and some of them not. There may be times when you're working in your level where you're like, Man, I wish I could easily hide out that landscape. I just want to see this level looks like with out the landscape. So I could check this box right here and boom, my landscape is gone. And you can see there's also hotkey associated with that. There may be a time and you're like, I want to see what my level looks like without any static meshes present in my level, my chairs a static mesh year, my tutorial And my platform, I believe that Static Mesh so I could go under my show flags and say hide all the static meshes.

And suddenly those are gone. I could say, hey, what is my level look like without any of my geometry, these two objects right here, this box geometry and this spiral staircase geometry I dragged out prior to this video being recorded. And so if I was to come under the show flag and go under BSP BSP is the same as geometry here. So, if I uncheck this that is going to hide out those objects. Another useful show flag here is collision. I'm going to get close to my chair here so we can see that easier.

Our chair mesh has some collision on it. So if I was to go under show show collision, I can see this little purple outline around it showing the collision on this particular object. I'm going to turn that back off right Now, another one that may be useful to you is the grid. And the grid is probably easiest to see here in an orthographic view. So let me temporarily turn off my landscape come into a top orthographic view. And you can see I've got this grid in the background so I could go show, hide the grid.

And now you're not going to see the grid back there, which I don't know why you would ever want to turn off the grid but if you wanted to that is available to you. Um, you can also turn off things such as I got a particle out here if you want to hide all particles in your level, you could come under here and uncheck particle sprite and you will not see those anymore, either. So some good little tricks to know about for when you are working, laying out your level that is gonna do it all for this video on view modes and show flags. We will see you guys in The next video