[TUORIAL]Making angled roofs

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l3eeron
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[TUORIAL]Making angled roofs

Post by l3eeron » Wed Nov 19, 2008 12:08 pm

Learning the things brought up here are essential to making a sound map.


This tutorial assumes you have basic knowledge of Hammer. You need to know what the different tools are called and how they work. This will touch on brush creation and how to manipulate them using the clipping and vertex tools, while keeping things neat and "on grid".

Keep in mind, there are many ways of doing this, this is just one way. I like this way because it keeps all the brushes touching (not overlapping) or skewed at some weird angle.

OK, lets get started.


Open your map or start a new one. Set your grid size to 8 (use the "[]" keys to increase/decrease grid size) In the top 2D view create a brush the size that your building will be. Texture it with your choice of texture. I made this one

576x320x256 and textured with wood/wood_wall002


Next, clip the brush in half in either the side or front 2D view to make two 576x320x128 brushes.


Image


Now to make the actual roof brushes.

- Select the top brush and clip, using side or front 2D view, an 8 unit piece to be textured with your roof texture, I used metal/wall028.

Image


This next part is important, as it will keep your geometry sound and sealed.

- Expand the 8 unit roof brush out past the edges of the rest of the building (this will later create the eves) making the eves to fit your size and intended detail work later on. In this example, I only went 8 units past, the building is pretty small.

- Select the both top brushes and clip them in half using the top 2D view length-wise. Also, clip the roof edges exactly where the over hang meets the wall. Look at the 3D view in the next image:

Image
Image


- Now while all the top brushes are selected, including all the roof brushes and over hang pieces, click the vertex tool. While in vertex mode select one side of the roof and it's overhang like seen in the following image:

Image



With the overhang, and edge of roof vertices selected, using the DOWN arrow key to angle the roof all the way until the vertices are merged. Repeat for the opposite side.

Image


If the angle is too steep, grab the apex of the roof and bring it down until you get the right look.


Add details brushes and props

Image
Last edited by l3eeron on Wed Nov 19, 2008 12:39 pm, edited 1 time in total.

itchy
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Re: [TUORIAL]Making angled roofs

Post by itchy » Wed Nov 19, 2008 12:27 pm

What's the drawback of doing it with the carve tool instead?
[img]http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3566/3304587268_69e66ce816_o.png[/img]
[size=67][url=http://www.theville.org/viewtopic.php?t=11702]I've been found out![/url][/size]

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Post by l3eeron » Wed Nov 19, 2008 12:37 pm

As a general rule, the carve tool is BAD. Because it's really hard to crave neatly and keep everything on grid, and optimized. Especially when dealing with angles. If you were trying to cut a simple square on a square brush, it might be OK, if you were very careful. But you never want to carve anything that's angled or circular.
Source SDK Docs wrote:Do not carve

Carve is not a very smart tool, and it has become a standard saying that people should never try to carve with anything except rectangular blocks that are aligned to the grid. For example, trying to carve a cylindrical hole in a wall will horribly mangle the wall (see picture). As to optimization, there are three problems:

* This can sometimes confuse BSP, although not always.
* When the brushes are broken into triangles for drawing, there will be many more than are needed.
* If this wall is a world brush and it touches other world brushes, those brushes will also be broken into triangles poorly.

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Post by shimmybot » Wed Nov 19, 2008 1:12 pm

Teaching yourself to not use the carve tool is so hard :lol: took me a while to finally go "No" when faced with the option to use it :P

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Post by M's » Wed Nov 19, 2008 1:40 pm

Head spinning to much to understand. I guess thats why we have you l3eeron keep up the good work. I can barely draw a straight line with a ruler.

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Post by shimmybot » Wed Nov 19, 2008 2:49 pm

well good thing hammer only lets you do stuff in straight lines XD

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Post by Ian_Suffix » Wed Nov 19, 2008 5:28 pm

I discovered first hand a long time ago the horrors that the carve tool will cause:

Once upon a time, I made simple custom maps for HL2 so that I could see NPCs interact with each other and so I could drive over hundreds (fact check: less than 100) of zombies in the stylin' Jalopy. Anyway, I used the carve tool to make a circular hole in the ground to dump zombies in, but when I ran it in game, the game slowed down to 9FPS whenever I looked in the general direction of the hole. I don't know if I've ever used the carve tool after that, as the vector and trim tools seem to take care of everything that the carve tool might work on.

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Post by shimmybot » Wed Nov 19, 2008 5:55 pm

[quote="Ian_Suffix";p="134892"]
I discovered first hand a long time ago the horrors that the carve tool will cause:

Once upon a time, I made simple custom maps for HL2 so that I could see NPCs interact with each other and so I could drive over hundreds (fact check: less than 100) of zombies in the stylin' Jalopy. Anyway, I used the carve tool to make a circular hole in the ground to dump zombies in, but when I ran it in game, the game slowed down to 9FPS whenever I looked in the general direction of the hole. I don't know if I've ever used the carve tool after that, as the vector and trim tools seem to take care of everything that the carve tool might work on.
[/quote]

THIS

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Re: [TUORIAL]Making angled roofs

Post by Ra^Groz » Wed Oct 21, 2009 2:40 pm

Making the roof tilt is not hard. It is making the triangle on the end. When I do it for my map it works sometimes. Other times I get errors left and right.

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