mapping problem

[Vomica7]

I think everyone is forgetting my beautiful complex cave job in ms_snow.

I DID THE CAVE PART IN THAT MAP!!!!

sorry, I just get a little frustrated when people dont credit me when they know I did it.

people who dont know, its ok.

*tattoos it to chest*

 

[PBarnum]

speaking of tattoos. Im going to get another one on my upper left chest area.

something I drew

 

[Sabre]

Looks like something you'd see sprayed on a wall in City 17, it's cool.

 

[Vomica7]

(underneath it).
"...and you get handcuffed and sent to prison."

 

[PBarnum]

I already got peace (written in arabic) on my back

 

[Vomica7]

what i got done so far today

 

[evilsquirrel]

that fog looks really wierd

 

[DarkWasp]

hehe

i never (ever)^10^10^10 use carve.

ever.










ever.

Actauly I think an experianced mapper like you should use carve every once and a while.

It is pretty handy for speeding things up.

(All the newbies reading the post, you're going to want to get a much better feel for architecture and performance before you try this.)

Say for example, you have a slanted wall with like 6 beams across to the other wall.

And you want to be neat and slant the end of the beams to fit the wall.

Instead of sliding all of the vertices to accomplish that slant, all you have to do is select the wall (maybe vis hide everything but the wall and the beams) and hit carve.

This way it carves that slant for you, and you will still have 6 faces and 4 vertices.

My policy for the carve tool: If it's going to add more faces (cut through the brush) do it yourself.



And again, newbies... Don't try this at home. (Besides, just imagine when you tell someone "I'm a newbie mapper, but an EXPERT with the carve tool". Yeah, that wouldnt go over well."


EDIT: Oh, and Squirrel with the doorways... Carve cuts horizontaly, which is bad 75% of the time.


I need to go find that Source tutorial that explained very clearly when and when not to use carve.

 

[The Man In Black]

Thothie is gonna kill you so dead....

 

[Gaz]

Carve....no matter what you say, is REALLY bad!

I've used hammer/worldcraft since HL1 was released, and I maybe used it like 10 times before I discovered clip tool.

Its RUBBISH!

 

[DarkWasp]

I'll demonstrate what all the negative hype is about. (For all you people who have no clue what we are talking about)

This is the basic reason why carve is such a dangerous tool. It looks harmless, but the horizontal cut is very sloppy for mappers. Now the wall is split into two on both sides. Duplication and cutting more stuff out gets more diffucult. But most importantly, the engine and compile has to think through two walls

This is what newbies do with the carve tool... Imagine trying to work with that.

Now if you use the clip tool and cut it yourself, the door and the hole are not bothering the walls to the left and right. This is much easier to work with, it looks better. And you can now neatly add windows on either side of the door.


EDIT: This post was a wee bit of a joke, but I wasn't aware of the offset thing happening in a basic carve like that.

I never used Carve in an HL1 map before.

 

[Thothie]

*sigh* Not even going to bother...

 

[PBarnum]

Then you can use the carve without doing any damage.

if it was me, I would take the top right corner of the light blue rectangle and (vertex manip) move it 40 units to the left instead of bothering with carve. to me thats easier

I have always been taugh to think carving and cutting is bad and vertex manip is GOD

 

[AmIAnnoyingNow]

Or you could just clip or use vertex manipulation it and get the exact same result in the same number of steps.

edit: meh, barnum beat me to it

 

[DarkWasp]

Then you can use the carve without doing any damage.

if it was me, I would take the top right corner of the light blue rectangle and (vertex manip) move it 40 units to the left instead of bothering with carve. to me thats easier

I have always been taugh to think carving and cutting is bad and vertex manip is GOD

Well those last two posts were purposed to ruffle some feathers. (Ehehe and they did.)

But, for all of you new mappers that are reading this, the Vertex tool is a bit tricky.

It may have godly outcomes (I like it alot myself and use it all the time) but you have to be careful.

For example, if you grab only one vertice on a box and drag it out somewhere, it's going to distort the box and the sides it is not alighned with will appear very strange.

I had whole buildings turn into ropework before I knew about this.

If you want to move just one corner, you have to clip the box into two wedges.

Basicly, all faces have to stay flat.

You can do whatever you want to a traingular face though, you cant distort those with the vertex tool (unless you flip it inside out).


(Oh BTW, I meant what I said about not carving the doorway though)

 

[Thothie]

Then you can use the carve without doing any damage.

You've done damage, you just can't see it. Go back to the first page of the thread and read the rant at the end.

In anycase that's exactally the sort of stupid thing that leads you having to redo your entire map from scratch a hundred brushes later. That there is a job for clipping or vertex tool.

 

[DarkWasp]

Then you can use the carve without doing any damage.

You've done damage, you just can't see it. Go back to the first page of the thread and read the rant at the end.

In anycase that's exactally the sort of stupid thing that leads you having to redo your entire map from scratch a hundred brushes later. That there is a job for clipping or vertex tool.

So what's the first sign of this?

 

[evilsquirrel]

that there is a job for a block, and a wedge shaped wall...

 

[Vomica7]

that fog looks really wierd

its spider webs youll be able to tell when i make more of that room.

 

[PBarnum]

here is a very basic good, bad, worst scenario for vertex manip

this is legal:


this is illegal:

you cannot have two faces on the same plane:

this is even more illegal:

(forget the error name) you cannot do that

of course, its a LOT more complicated then that, but you get the jist of it

 

[Vomica7]

this is even more illegal:

(forget the error name) you cannot do that

oh god it hurts!

 

[Thothie]

So what's the first sign of this?

The first sign is the map will start generating many more clip nodes than need be, so the r_speeds will steadily rise. "Air Splitting" is something that's hard to notice though. Eventually you'll start getting weird errors, like perpendicular to face, that isn't, or bad surface extents, when there ain't none, or (my favorite) full bright with no compile errors or warnings what so ever.

this is legal:

Legal, yes - smart, no. While it won't cause you the deadly no-way-back problems that Carve eventually will, it will spike your r_speeds. The engine doesn't really know what to do with a shape like that, and it will split it in strange and extremely inefficient ways - so it's best to build something like that out of several smaller brushes, just try to fit them together in such a way that you use as few as possible, and split any brush it is touching to stop said from doing similarly strange stuff during render.

Highlands (especially the original, but also the current) has much higher r_speeds than need be due to a lot of brushes like that one. "Cylinder Abuse" as J-M would call it. Looking at that map with gl_wireframe 1 will give you a serious headache.

 

[Vomica7]

i never use primitives other than block.

 

[Thothie]

Usually wise. Combine that with splitting or vertex merging said blocks into triangles, and you can construct just about anything. (Triangles are v.flexible).

Examples of cylinder abuse splitting in-game (gl_wireframe):
http://www.thothie.com/msc_dev1/cyl_abuse1.gif
http://www.thothie.com/msc_dev1/cyl_abuse2.gif

Excuse the blocky pictures - still on my internal graphics card here. - But as you can see from all the fine white lines, this makes a LOT more brushes than there need to be due to all the post-compile splitting the engine has to do to make it work.

 

[evilsquirrel]

thothie - couldn't ya just fix that carve thing from notepad :|