faceposer/mapping

You can make rough ground by making it a displacement and then painting the geometry along the Z access.

As far as a circle in the roof, if you want just that, a normal circle, then you can either use displacements or normal brushes, though this kind of detail may take a little while. If you're talking about a dome, you'd want to use normal brushes and the vertex manipulation tool. Someone else was talking about how to do it on here not to long ago, dr. peper I believe.

Hope that helps.

You can also use dispGen to generate displacements more easily. Hammer's brush tools are not very useful, but with dispGen you can use any paint program to draw your heightfield. So for instance, you could quickly make a dome from a simple gradient circle.

Displacement tools all the way, using things like dispgen detract from the proper way of doing things, it measn if ever you can't do something with dispgen it means you have no idea how to do it.
Do it properly every time - use the built in displacement stuff.

Okay, but what about the dish in Hydro. I doubt that was done solely in Hammer by hand. There is no "proper" way of doing things, don't be so prescriptive. There's getting it done, not getting it done, and needlessly wasting your time on the road to either.

There is a way of doing it actually, it probably involves a pencil paper and a calculator and some good old fasioned brain power then using the 'raise to' bit of the displacement tool

Seriously and with all due respect, that is a complete waste of time. It is a mindless repetitive task better suited for a computer to solve. I mean if you're going to do it that way why even use a calculator? Why not employ the use of an abacus?

The method you're describing is actually the way the "animators" did things for the lightcycle scenes in the movie Tron, because the software of the time was not up to the task of performing kinematic equations. In fact it had no concept of animation at all for that matter. I assure you, the animators working on Toy Story could have done things similarly, but they apparently did not hate themselves that much and thankfully, software has come a long way.

I mean you could forgoe all use of Hammer and build a map with your fabled calculator/pencil/paper and a text editor. Whether that would be a serviceable use of brain power is disputable.

Jive Turkey said:

There's getting it done, not getting it done, and needlessly wasting your time on the road to either.

Click to expand...

Oh, I do that last one all the time.

Dispgen is a handy tool, but far from the be-all and end-all of displacements. It'd be hard doing the displacements like you have in hydro with it, to bring up a single quick example.

I performed a quick text search for "end-all" and "be-all" in my post. Came up empty. I'll definitely stop advocating 3d party tool use though. Go back to pushing vertices (without even the benefit of a tablet, how advanced).