.
"
No one ever learned anything new, by only sticking to what they already know."
Know that everyone, starts off this way, some people never look for help and they go on making crappy maps or give up. The only way to make outside environments easier to do, is to do more of them. You've got a decent start, you really do. You know your way around the editor enough to get something playable, you just need to build on that knowledge.
What you need to do, is keep your chin up and keep muscling forward.
Suggestions:
- Apply a scale helper texture to just about everything. Use something like the gray texture in Youme's displacement tutorial, world craft also comes with other stock scale textures if not there are tons of them floating around, they aren't that hard to make either and if you haven't created and imported textures before it might be a good intro. This is important because these big boxes are going to be sliced wherever the texture tiles. So it helps to know exactly how many texture tiles are on a wall. You don't want a wall thats 258 units high, because it adds another near microscopic row of texture. Which if you make that habit, it could help kill the maps performance.
It also helps to get a sense of scale.
- Don't make your buildings out of one big box. Start off with a box for a wall make it 8 units thick and however high. Then copy it and rotate it to make the other walls.
- Do the same for the roof.
- In the top viewport draw out a big brush that covers half of your building, Use the little X in the center of walls to figure out where the center is.
- Giving yourself some room for it to hang over the walls. Then in the front viewport click the brush so you can skew it, and push it up until you have a nice roof angle.
- Next You should probably use vertex exit mode to snap the roof to the grid. Texture it, copy it by shift-drag, flip it so the other side is covered.
- Now you need to create a triangle that fits between the top of your walls and the roof, vertex edit and snap it, or cut it.
- Also know that where two brushes intersect or meet, they will also be sliced during the compile. That is unless you turn some of them into Func_detail entities, click "to entity" and it should be the first thing that pops up. These entities can't be used to seal off our level and they won't block vis, but where two func_detail entities intersect or meet they won't break apart during compile. This really helps speed things up in your map, especially compile times.
- Buildings in TF2 aren't always big 4 walled buildings. Take some time to noclip around some of the TF2 maps, take screen shots and go back into world craft and recreate what you see. I won't ruin the chance of self education and discovery, as that exercise alone is a VERY valuable skill to have. Learning to dissect the world around you or a game world so you can faithfully recreate it, is paramount in creating good maps. After a while you should stop copying and start innovating. Because as fun as it is to pull off something that looks like it was a straight copy/paste from TF2, people really like seeing something new.