I'm working on a hill, as alluded to in the title, for a sort-of proof-of-concept Payload Race King of the Hill map. Thanks to ABS to confirming that such a game mode is possible.
The thing is, I'm having a heck of a time even working on 1/8th of the thing and having it stay intact when I reload the VMF in Hammer.
What I start off with is a cylinder with 24 sides measuring 1160x2320x192. I copy that in order to make an inside cylinder later. I then, using the vertex scaling tool, select all of the bottom corners and scale them by 1.2 for an even 1392x2784. This is the bottom tier. I take the copied cylinder, scale it by .6 on the x and y axes and double its height for the bottom tier to 'wrap' its path around. However, the x and y dimensions leave the cylinder unsuitable for use of the vertex scaling tool, so I manually scale them to 700x1400, make a copy of this cylinder, and use the vertex scaler and scale the bottom by 1.4 to 980x1960. This is the middle tier.
I take the copy of the second cylinder, scale the x and y by .6 again, the z is already the size I want it, and scale them manually to 420x840. I use the vertex scaler tool on the bottom again and scale it by 1.5 to 630x1260. This is the top tier. I switch to the clip tool and clip the bottom piece into 4 696x1392x192 pieces. I halve the middle tier horizontally to have two pieces 192 units in height, the bottom of which I won't touch at all, and quarter the top half of the middle tier like I did the bottom tier.
Originally I tried cutting one of the bottom quarters diagonally(as seen in image 2), in order to have a wedge-like shape with a ramp, but this unoptimally removed vertices. However, now when I try to edit the whole quarter it ends up unloaded due to errors in the VMF.
This is an example of what I'm trying to do. This particular example is unloaded on VMF reload:
This is what happened to another go at the quarter that meets the second tier, as well as a go at moving the bottom of the ramp edge out in order to, well, act as a ramp:
I'm guessing this is what happens when two faces 'merge' into one, as I was getting this with the bottom of the ramp edge in the above image. Though I'm not sure why the inner face is a red color:
This is an approximate restoration of what the previous image's distortion was. As you can see, there are some things missing(I was getting 16ish face ID filled messages when selecting this), unfortunately I wasn't using the grey texture for the top face so I have no idea where it is or where it went:
Now what I'm asking is, what am I doing wrong? I think it has something to do with concave objects, but I'm not really sure how that applies. Also, is there a better way to accomplish what I'm doing? Displacements seem like they would be incredibly difficult to work with to accomplish what I'm aiming for. Also, when I turned the quarter that meets the second tier into displacements the top face completely disappeared. Then I messed up and had no way to undo the displacement or have a backup save. I'm learning to keep those pretty quickly.
The thing is, I'm having a heck of a time even working on 1/8th of the thing and having it stay intact when I reload the VMF in Hammer.
What I start off with is a cylinder with 24 sides measuring 1160x2320x192. I copy that in order to make an inside cylinder later. I then, using the vertex scaling tool, select all of the bottom corners and scale them by 1.2 for an even 1392x2784. This is the bottom tier. I take the copied cylinder, scale it by .6 on the x and y axes and double its height for the bottom tier to 'wrap' its path around. However, the x and y dimensions leave the cylinder unsuitable for use of the vertex scaling tool, so I manually scale them to 700x1400, make a copy of this cylinder, and use the vertex scaler and scale the bottom by 1.4 to 980x1960. This is the middle tier.
I take the copy of the second cylinder, scale the x and y by .6 again, the z is already the size I want it, and scale them manually to 420x840. I use the vertex scaler tool on the bottom again and scale it by 1.5 to 630x1260. This is the top tier. I switch to the clip tool and clip the bottom piece into 4 696x1392x192 pieces. I halve the middle tier horizontally to have two pieces 192 units in height, the bottom of which I won't touch at all, and quarter the top half of the middle tier like I did the bottom tier.
Originally I tried cutting one of the bottom quarters diagonally(as seen in image 2), in order to have a wedge-like shape with a ramp, but this unoptimally removed vertices. However, now when I try to edit the whole quarter it ends up unloaded due to errors in the VMF.
This is an example of what I'm trying to do. This particular example is unloaded on VMF reload:
This is what happened to another go at the quarter that meets the second tier, as well as a go at moving the bottom of the ramp edge out in order to, well, act as a ramp:
I'm guessing this is what happens when two faces 'merge' into one, as I was getting this with the bottom of the ramp edge in the above image. Though I'm not sure why the inner face is a red color:
This is an approximate restoration of what the previous image's distortion was. As you can see, there are some things missing(I was getting 16ish face ID filled messages when selecting this), unfortunately I wasn't using the grey texture for the top face so I have no idea where it is or where it went:
Now what I'm asking is, what am I doing wrong? I think it has something to do with concave objects, but I'm not really sure how that applies. Also, is there a better way to accomplish what I'm doing? Displacements seem like they would be incredibly difficult to work with to accomplish what I'm aiming for. Also, when I turned the quarter that meets the second tier into displacements the top face completely disappeared. Then I messed up and had no way to undo the displacement or have a backup save. I'm learning to keep those pretty quickly.