Simple questions about brushes

Feb 17, 2009
1,165
376
I went through some official valve maps and i saw that there were som many brushes like skip n' stuff.
But i cant uderstand what are they for. Do i need my map to be full with these brushes???
I cant understand the ''Skip'' meaning from valve developer site. can someone tell me about neccecary brushes that i need in my map for optimization (?)
 

YM

LVL100 YM
aa
Dec 5, 2007
7,135
6,056
Skip is ignored. Totally. Its like it wasn't there.

Its used for 5/6 faces of brushes that only need one side (ie hint). Because the hint texture cuts up visleaves when vis is calulated you only want it in the planes where you want to cut the leaf, so you don't want it on all six sides of your brush, just one. Becasuse hammer can't do planes, only convex solids we use skip to tell it to ignore the rest of the brush.
 

Fearlezz

L10: Glamorous Member
May 4, 2008
787
476
what the silly old bear said
 

HojoTheGreat

L5: Dapper Member
Nov 11, 2008
206
34
Skip can also be used as a reference for spacing out objects equally. For example, say you have a long hallway and you want to place light fixtures hanging from the ceiling, all 200 units apart. Create a 200 unit long Skip brush and you've got a reference!
 

YM

LVL100 YM
aa
Dec 5, 2007
7,135
6,056
Skip can also be used as a reference for spacing out objects equally. For example, say you have a long hallway and you want to place light fixtures hanging from the ceiling, all 200 units apart. Create a 200 unit long Skip brush and you've got a reference!

oh yeah I forgot about that, they use them in hydro grouped to the arrows pointing each way because the animated textures don't show in hammer. Other places they use them are boxes around props, if the prop has a wierd origin and can't easily be lined up with the wall or floor then they'll put the first one in carefully and then put a skip brush around it so that next time they can just copy the skip and the prop together and since the skip is already on grid it will fit on the wall nicely without any fuss.