[GUIDE] Youme's guide to displacement cliffs
- Thread starter YM
- Start date
It's a bit late, and a bit irrelavent regarding displacements directly. But it is nice to see someone encouraging people to align their textures at wall corners. It makes a hell of a difference on displacements, so it is good to see you included this for people to read, so that they don't miss out one something that makes their maps that little bit more neat and proffesionally finished.
how exactly did he make the opening for the tunnel? Clip tool or something? Also, if you were to continue creating a map using that design, and made the tunnel lead to the other side of that cliff, would you have to put brushes on the other side? Because it looks like the back of the cliff was pushed in when you were playing with it.
yeah i get it now. Thanks 
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.Wjhat i want to know is how to do the top and two sides with an exterior corner. Everytime I do it, the seams come apart, and it won't allow me to sew them
I've heard lots about people's seams coming apart, I've never actually had this problem so I can't imagine what causes it.
Descriptions of displacements really suck so unfortunatly I'm not entirely sure what you are trying to do, there is the sample .vmf I posted here which has most joins that you'd want to do, feel free to cut bits out of it and use it in your own map, Its not like its a highly super awesome thing I made that I want exculsivity over, its just a cliff...
Descriptions of displacements really suck so unfortunatly I'm not entirely sure what you are trying to do, there is the sample .vmf I posted here which has most joins that you'd want to do, feel free to cut bits out of it and use it in your own map, Its not like its a highly super awesome thing I made that I want exculsivity over, its just a cliff...
What surprised me, is looking at valve maps.
I always thought their cliffs were made out of one block, and they just picked each side to make, etc.
But actually each "block" is 6 different brushes, that overlap at the edges. I guess it's so if they vertex manip it doesn't mess up?
I always thought their cliffs were made out of one block, and they just picked each side to make, etc.
But actually each "block" is 6 different brushes, that overlap at the edges. I guess it's so if they vertex manip it doesn't mess up?
phatal
L6: Sharp Member
- Jan 8, 2008
- 259
- 21
No... it's because displacements are best made with individual brushes not solid cubes.
Do you actually have any proof of that? It based on anything?
I almost always make them out of the individual brushes as standard practice but I've never actually thought about why I do.
It gets confusing in the 2d view when you have things overlaping. :w00t:
End result is that, but you have it more like this in the editor:
Though I forgot that you can slant the corners on the VERTICAL axis too. (I always cut the corners and made them fit like you have it for the walls, but never for where the top meets the walls.
Code:
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|End result is that, but you have it more like this in the editor:
Code:
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| |
| |Though I forgot that you can slant the corners on the VERTICAL axis too. (I always cut the corners and made them fit like you have it for the walls, but never for where the top meets the walls.
Maybe because when you do displacements, the only side that shows is the side you pick. All the other sides of the brush become invisible. Perhaps because of that they can overlap brushes, the graphics engine isn't trying to draw them that way.
I think it's more a case of it's no longer a "brush". It doesn't block vis and confuse the hell out of the compiler trying to form leaf nodes.
EDIT:
I do both, depends how i feel but if i mess up a displacement that is part of a number of disaplacement sides of the same brush, i have to destroy the whole brush to reset it if i can't undo it. So it's probably good practice to do it individually.
Also the decompilers around seem to not recognise displacements as whole objects (if they are at all) so it'll seperate all the faces making it hard to tell what's actually happening in the design process. It looked like in DoD they used several faces to a single brush on some displacements, but i didn't care to take notice of it in tf2, nor did i care to research into it propely, i just got some interesting decompile errors that made it appear that way.
EDIT:
I do both, depends how i feel
but if i mess up a displacement that is part of a number of disaplacement sides of the same brush, i have to destroy the whole brush to reset it if i can't undo it. So it's probably good practice to do it individually.Also the decompilers around seem to not recognise displacements as whole objects (if they are at all) so it'll seperate all the faces making it hard to tell what's actually happening in the design process. It looked like in DoD they used several faces to a single brush on some displacements, but i didn't care to take notice of it in tf2, nor did i care to research into it propely, i just got some interesting decompile errors that made it appear that way.
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VeryBad
L1: Registered
- May 25, 2008
- 4
- 1
First, I loved this tutorial! After reading the tutorial alone, I loaded up hammer and made a quick study map. Then I did some things that, well, in later replies you say were no-no's. When I made my cliffs, I started with the power of 2, and ended up with some fugly looking jagged edges. So I bumped up to the power of 4, subdivided and well had a smooth yet oddly shaped fugly cliff. So my bright idea was, "let's see if I can't smooth out these fugly bits. Of course it was before I read this;
Well I played with it for a sec and yes it did some odd things. Then I messed with the options. Trying different Axis' didn’t get me much progress, but I was sure that it had to work somehow. So I un-clicked the "Spatial" box, selected Axis Subdiv Normal and bingo it smoothed out the fugly points I was having problems with. After some more play time I found no significant difference between Axis Subdiv and Face Normal. Not to say there is not one, I just didn't see one. I also didn't try x, y, or z. They just didn't seem like the options I needed. Also I later tried playing with this tool on an inclined (non-ortho) displacement, and it did make it smooth. Maybe a bit too smooth, like flat. So I’d stick to making my displacements Ortho only for now, possibly rotating them later but seems like asking for headaches. I am kind of glad I played around before reading all the replies in the 6 pages first though. Other wise I might not have tried making smooth work. Anyhow, this is a great tutorial, thanks Youme.
Good thing I re-read this, I was making displacements and never cut through all the dispacements, no wonder I kept getting splits!
VeryBad - you can uncheck spatial as you say to smooth but I find that it smooths stuff way too much and I like to have full control over everything anyway so 90% of my displacements are done point by point, radius set to 1
I'll agree that making displacements where they aren't perpendicular to any of the three axis is 'tricky'.
I'll agree that making displacements where they aren't perpendicular to any of the three axis is 'tricky'.
I feel like the biggest noob on earth asking this, but how do you select only one side of a face at a time?
not sure if it's relavent now but i had this same problem when following the tutorial i decided to start over and realized that you have to clip off the edges of the tunnel entrance just like you did on the corners. its an easy detail to miss but basically treat the tunnel entrance just like the corner in the screenshot clip all the edges