Mapping on an angle while staying on grid?

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MegapiemanPHD

Doctorate in Deliciousness
aa
Mar 31, 2012
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I suck at mapping on angles. Pretty much everything I make are squares and that's probably bad.

Rotating stuff is easy but it never stays on grid. Trying to fix something that I've made then rotated is a huge pain in the butt and impossible to keep everything the correct size. What are some techniques people use to make buildings and brush structures on an angle while staying on grid.

Before anyone mentions instances, I'm not asking about that. Instances are above my skill level at this point and not what I'm attempting to learn. Using an instance to rotate a building or structure still doesn't teach me how to reliably map using angles.

Any and all help is fantastic. Links to existing articles as well as general advice on life, liberty, and existence, ya know, as long as it's relevant.
 

Idolon

they/them
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Feb 7, 2008
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Your two options are instances or getting to know the vertex edit tool. I'll see about putting together a video on using vertex edit to create angled buildings later today.
 

Urban

aa
Jul 27, 2009
212
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You can use the vertex tool to adjust a brush to follow a ratio. Hopefully the image will show what I mean.

ratios.png


The left brush is using a ratio of 1 to 1. You can see that the lines of the brush intersects with the grid every single grid square.
The right brush is using a ratio of 1 to 2. The lines of the brush intersect with the grid every 2 grid squares.
This ratio remains constant no matter what grid size you have.

You can use whatever ratio you want but usually you will probably mostly use ratios of 1-1, 1-2 and 1-3, depending on how shallow or sharp the angle you want needs to be. The higher the ratio goes the more awkward it is to fit other brushes around it though. It is probably best to play around with getting the ratios right, once you have practiced a little bit it gets much easier to angle brushwork correctly.

Hope this helps a bit.
 

Sergis

L666: ])oo]v[
aa
Jul 22, 2009
1,874
1,257
Instances are above my skill level at this point
pls

it aint nothing but a vmf that is put into another vmf(especially if youre lazy like me and dont use entity name prefixing), just do them

as for instanceless angled mapping, find angles that make your vertices stay on grid so you can align stuff nicely - a 1-1, 2-3, 2-5 ratio, not something like 23455-95745 where no vertices ever are on grid and you cant sew your angled stuff to regular ongrid stuff

basically make and keep in mind your own angled grid as said in idolons video

next main thing to keep in mind is if you dare to make an angled slope, you gotta keep all the vertices coplanar or hammer will not play nice
 

Pocket

Half a Lambert is better than one.
aa
Nov 14, 2009
4,694
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Mind you, instances are kind of useless when it comes to making angled buildings that line up with non-angled ones; they're only effectual for freestanding ones (like the barn by BLU spawn in Mann Manor). All the official maps that have significant angled buildings connecting to non-angled ones (Double Cross, Upward, Thunder Mountain, Foundry) stick to 45 degree angles.
 

Crowbar

Spiritual preprocessor
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Dec 19, 2015
1,455
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It's possible to make them sort of line up if you don't make stuff that causes precision to be lost, but it's not very worth it and in most cases becomes not easily editable (same with ratio-based stuff though) and will probably contain some overlaps. But if you desperately need an actual angle, not a ratio, instances are just what you use.