Blockout & true scale Project 1 due · Project 2 launch

10:00 · Brief The tape measure is the tool

Everyone in this room has stood in a virtual space that felt subtly wrong — ceilings too grand, chairs slightly toylike. That wrongness is almost always scale, and your body detects it in milliseconds even when your eyes can't say why. Project 1 exists to train that judgment out of guesswork and into measurement.

Grayboxing: designing before decorating

A blockout (graybox) is the space with everything removed except the decisions that matter: proportions, openings, sightlines, circulation. Gray boxes, no materials, no props. The discipline is refusing detail until the bones are right — because moving a wall costs nothing in a graybox and everything in a dressed scene. Professional level design lives and dies in this phase; so will your Project 1 grade.

1:1 or nothing

Unreal's convention: one unreal unit is one centimeter. A 2.4 m ceiling is 240 units, full stop. The numbers that anchor a human-scale space: door openings around 80–90 cm wide and roughly 205 cm tall, counters near 90 cm, seat heights near 45 cm, eye height around 160–170 cm. When you rebuild your measured room, every one of these comes from your tape measure, not from this list — the list just tells you which numbers to go collect.

Reference is evidence

Project 1's brief (see the Projects tab) requires a reference sheet: photos plus measurements of the real space. Treat it like a surveyor would — a floor-plan sketch with dimensions written on it, photos from repeatable positions, heights as well as widths. The test at crit in Week 6: someone who knows the real space should feel its proportions in the headset.

10:45 · Guided lab Measure, then build

We graybox a shared reference space together — a corner of CCB-134 itself, measured live — so everyone leaves knowing the workflow before applying it to their own Project 1 space.

1. Measure for real

   In pairs, measure the room's key dimensions with a tape: wall lengths, ceiling height, the door opening (width and height), one window. Sketch a plan and write every number on it. Photograph the sketch — it goes in your reference sheet.

2. A level for the blockout

   New Basic level in your sandbox, saved as L_Blockout_Cass. Delete the default floor if it fights your plan; your measured floor replaces it.

3. Set your snapping to match reality

   Set grid snapping to 10 (10 cm) in the viewport snapping controls — fine enough for architecture, coarse enough to stay aligned. All translation happens snapped today.

4. Block the shell with modeling tools

   Switch to Modeling mode from the mode selector in the main toolbar. Create boxes for floor and walls, typing exact dimensions rather than dragging by eye — a 412 cm wall is 412 units, not "about four meters."

5. Cut the openings

   Build door and window openings at their measured sizes — as gaps between wall segments or with the modeling tools' boolean operations, whichever you can control precisely. The door opening is the scale anchor your body knows best; get it exact.

6. Place the mannequin

   Add a human-scale reference — the UE mannequin (from the Third Person content, added via the Content Browser's Add menu) or any 180 cm reference figure — and stand it in the doorway. If the mannequin looks wrong in the door, one of your numbers is wrong. Find which.

7. Walk it

   Play in editor and walk the space. Compare what your eyes report against the room you're physically sitting in. Note every spot where the virtual room feels off, then check those measurements first.

8. Back up the graybox

   Zip a dated copy of the project to your cloud drive before the AI lab.

12:00 · Workbench Practice, unhurried

No new material. You work on your own file while I circulate — this is the hour where the technique from the guided lab stops being something you watched and becomes something you can do.

1. Finish the lab on your own work

   The guided lab was built on the class example. Now do it on the piece you are actually submitting. That second pass is where it sticks.

2. If you fell behind, catch up here

   This is what the hour is for. Say so and I will come to you — do not spend it quietly stuck.

3. If you are ahead, go deeper

   Take the optional extensions from the lab, or push the piece further than the brief asks. Nothing graded depends on them.

4. Ask the AI TA anything

   The tutor on the course site is open all term for questions about how and why. It explains; you build. No agents in the work until Week 9.

1:15 · Crit / share Choose your room

Everyone declares their Project 1 space with photos and rough dimensions, and takes thirty seconds to defend the choice: what makes its proportions worth rebuilding? A good Project 1 space has a scale signature — something a body would recognize. We pressure-test the risky picks now, not at crit.

Homework — due before Week 4

Resources

• Epic Developer Community — Learning — the level-design and modeling-mode guided courses cover today's toolkit.
• Unreal MCP docs — reference for the actor and geometry toolsets the agent used today.
• Digital twins & spatial computing (2025) — this week's State of the Art reading.
• Project 1 brief — deliverables and assessment criteria for the Digital Twin Flyover.