Help converting other maps into hammer.

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Vander

L8: Fancy Shmancy Member
Feb 16, 2008
506
215
I seem to recall Vilepickle saying somewhere that he imported some of his Quake remakes directly into Hammer to give a good base to start from.

I've been looking for inspiration for my first offical map for the last few weeks and I finally found it. A clan mate wants me to do a remake of Facing Worlds from UT (a.k.a. Face?).

I don't even know where to begin to import this into Hammer. Can anyone point me towards some resources to check out? I really like the look of the map, I just installed UT for the first time to walk through it. It's obviously going to need some heavy modification to fit TF2....and I'm not sure about the whole rotation above the planet aspect. I may toss that out if turns out to be too much and try to fit a different theme while attempting to preserve the general layout.
 

DJive

Cake or Death?
aa
Dec 20, 2007
1,465
741
With that question ill add my own.

How do you open Q3a/RTCW, RTCW:ET .map files in hammer.

I could never seem how to figure it out.

reference of course.
 

trainRiderJ

L5: Dapper Member
Mar 14, 2008
203
31
I should point out that there is already a remake of facing worlds, just so you're aware.

I would also like to know the importing process.
 

Paria

L5: Dapper Member
Dec 12, 2007
202
31
as a start for .map files from rtcw i used the following

with hammer 3.4 version 1983 http://collective.valve-erc.com/index.php?go=hammer - which you can still download, you are able to load .map files - however before you get most of the map into hammer properly you need to edit the .map file with a text editor (i did this a couple of weeks ago so i cant remember exactly what vilepickle told me :/) but basically it involved deleting some parts and renaming somethings to func_detail,

once you can get a .map file file into the old hammer you can save it as a vmf then load it in the current release,

so basically wait till vilepickle comes along and sheds light on the steps i forgot :D
 

Vilepickle

Banned
Oct 25, 2007
372
199
You need Hammer 3.4 version 1983 installed, and select HL as your game. This allows you to open .map files. However, it's not quite as easy as that.

I don't think you'll be able to use UT maps, as they use some other process for mapping... you also can't use Doom 3 since the brushes are defined in a different way.

Basically, you need to remove all patches in a q3 engine map, because the minute that Hammer encounters one it stops opening the map. So you have to go through the .map in a text editor and remove each patch... or, if there's some way to open the old map and filter patches that might be a good way, but I just use the text editor. Find the word "patch" and remove the whole entity.

You need to also find/replace func_group with func_detail, as there is no func_group in Source.

Once you do that and save it as .rmf, open the .rmf in new hammer and save as .vmf. Then find/replace skybox, caulk, hints, clips, etc with all of the Source equivalent tools/toolsXXX textures. Then you're basically done.

Just make sure when you open the map in old hammer that the map loads all of it or very close to all of it.
 

phatal

L6: Sharp Member
Jan 8, 2008
259
21
I had asked this a long time ago and was told there was no way for ut99. I got no assistance such as this which is quite helpful but still seems like it's not possible... well no easy way of doing it without a lot of text editting.

FYI ut99 maps had .unr file extension. Textures, sounds, etc. were in seperate folders with their own unique extensions (which isn't a big deal). I did a lot of research on the conversion but was unable to find anything remotely usable however I didn't know that you could use an older version of hammer to open a different file type.

BTW... are there other extensions hammer 3.4 would accept??
 

Vander

L8: Fancy Shmancy Member
Feb 16, 2008
506
215
I should point out that there is already a remake of facing worlds, just so you're aware.

*face palm* <----appropriate!

I searched for one just to be sure before posting. For some reason I didn't think to just search "face". I found ctf_face_beta_45 on FPS banana. Skybox looks cool, but the towers look like ass.

The whole idea behind importing to Hammer was to make sure I got the towers looking REALLY nice. Now I see it may not be possible to import AND some other mapper has beat me to the punch. What do you guys think? Should I build a better version, or just scrap it and find inspiration elsewhere?
 

DJive

Cake or Death?
aa
Dec 20, 2007
1,465
741
i was actually working on rtcw:et Battery map.
 

A Boojum Snark

Toraipoddodezain Mazahabado
aa
Nov 2, 2007
4,775
7,669
As a side note, Unreal maps can be built subtractively (starting with a solid cube, and carving out of it, the opposite of Source), so a map built like that would probably be even more impossible to import.
 

Hawk

L7: Fancy Member
Dec 3, 2007
419
213
I think a person would be better off starting from scratch anyway, and building their map "in the spirit of" a particular map rather than making a close replica. TF2's gameplay mechanics change the requirements of a level as you have to worry about things like different classes and sentry gun range.
 

efciem

L69: Deviant Member
Mar 31, 2008
69
6
Ok well, here's my best suggestion

Since we can all admit even taking Quake , RTCW maps into hammer for TF2 is really unusable accept as reference..


Here is my suggestion for Exporting Unreal Maps for reference in hammer..


1st, you must have Unreal-ED for whatever game your unreal map is from..


UNREALED has a plugin available to export Unreal Maps into "X3d" format for VRML web authoring..

Export the Unreal Map to X3d , then Import the X3d file into Blender , or 3dsmax or other similar modeling package.. I know Blender and 3dsmax have X3d import plugins available..


Once you have them in there, Export them out as models to load into Hammer.


You can then have the Scale of the map intact, and all valid geometry viewable to refer to as you map.


Its a crazy work around but should work without a problem, I've loaded unreal maps into 3dsmax a couple times using this method and it looks remarkably good, no reason they wouldnt work as prop model mesh's in hammer.
 

Brandished

L5: Dapper Member
Jan 19, 2008
234
311
Why not "export to map" once you get the map into Blender via the X3d format?

Then you could open the map file in the old Hammer 3.4 editor and save it to an rmf file which can be imported into the current version (4.1) of Hammer.

EDIT:
I looked into this method, Blender doesn't support the X3d format by default and the website that had the script to import X3d files into Blender has 404'd.

UnrealEd can export to the Wavefront OBJ File Format, but I haven't had any luck importing the OBJ files it creates into Blender (using the OBJ importer Blender version 2.46 comes with anyways). Every time I tried to import one of the UnrealEd created OBJ files into Blender I ran into a memory error during the import process. It still might be possible if you played around with the settings a bit, I only tried using the defaults as I'm not very familiar with UnrealEd or the OBJ file format.
 
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