How to make tunnels like Lakeside?

[JanieCox]

I've tried looking around and can't find anything that's helped with precisely what I'm going for, so first real thread time! If anyone could help me figure out ways to make tunnels like the flanks in Lakeside that would be great. I also find it likely that there's more than one way so if you've got multiple feel free to let me know!

(Also keep in mind I'm a beginner so any way to keep responses more "Mapping for Dummies" is greatly appreciated)

 

[d3adfin]

set up brushes on the walls/floor/ceiling of where you wanna make the tunnel like this
make sure the interior edges of the brushes where the edges of the tunnel would connect do actually connect because it makes the next bit much easier

select all of the interior faces with the face edit sheet by ctrl+clicking them, then go to the displacement tab on the face edit sheet and select create

from there you can use the 'paint geometry option to mess with the way the tunnel is proportioned however you please

selecting the sew option will automatically connect the points of the displacements that are on edges that are touching each other as long as you have the brushes with those two edges selectd in case you mess with something and it misaligns or whatever

hope this helps

 

[JanieCox]

Thanks for the help! I should probably wait to do displacements until my map is in a bit of a further stage, right?

 

[Tiftid]

It depends. Displacements can become pretty easy to build and edit after a lot of practice (especially if you use this method), so some people like to do them early on.
I personally find displacement work soul-crushing and procrastinate it as much as possible.
It's not even the displacement painting part, it's the knowledge that I'm gonna have to build new nodraw brushes to seal the world, because i turned the old brushes into displacements.

A philosophy I've heard that I like is "only do displacements in alpha if you want to create gameplay you couldn't create without using displacements".
In the case of the Lakeside tunnels, it'd be relatively easy to build near-identical copies of them with brushes and vertex edit, so that's probably what I'd do instead of using displacements straight away.