Unreal Units
Document Summary: This document describes the Unreal Unit of measure and the common scale factors used.
Document Changelog: Created; maintained over time.
Overview
The current Unreal Unit scale has been determined by tweaking of many of the constants in Unreal Engine 3. As a result, deviating from this scale by a factor of 2 should be fairly straightforward, but deviating by a factor of 10 might have some subtle and hard to track down side effects. In general, Epic does not recommend changing the Unreal Unit scale by more than a factor of 2.
Current Game Scales
In all of the Unreal Tournament games, 1 Unreal Unit is equal to 2 cm.
In Gears of War approximately 2 Unreal Units equal 1 inch, because the characters are 156 units tall and a floor of a building is 256 units tall. This was decided on for grid purposes and so our cover height worked out well.
The values for gravity were not based on reality, but on what felt right.
Most licensees use a scale of 1 Unreal Unit to 1 cm.
Changing Units
For details on how to change the Unreal Unit scale, see the Changing Units page.
Important!
You are viewing documentation for the Unreal Development Kit (UDK).
If you are looking for the Unreal Engine 4 documentation, please visit the Unreal Engine 4 Documentation site.